Forecast – Spring School

We invited the LINA Fellow Neo-futuristic Walks (Aušra Česnauskytė and Goda Verikaitė) to

facilitate a workshop at the “Forecast Spring School” and a walk in the framework of the

Forecast Festival Eight. We organized the Spring School together with LINA Member Living

Summer School, and in collaboration with LINA Member LUMA Arles. The “Spring School” is a

summer school format, happening in March.

Summer School “Spring School – Plants in Cityscapes – Forecast Festival 8 ”

LINA Fellows – Integration of

The Forecast alumni, cartoonist Ulli Lust and artist Markus Hoffmann, were joined by LINA Fellow Neo-futuristic Walks to develop the “Spring School”, which was titled “Plants in Cityscapes”. Ulli Lust, Markus Hoffmann and Neo-futuristic Walks offered a rich program of three distinct multi-day workshops that examined plants in the city from different perspectives.

The Spring School also featured a digital talk from LUMA Arles by the artist Axelle Gisserot. The “Spring School” took place at Radialsystem, Berlin in the same week as the Forecast Festival Eight. The Spring School ran parallel to the festival set-up and included a public walk by Neo-futuristic Walks on the Saturday during the Forecast Festival.

Forecast Alumni Ulli Lust offered a drawing workshop during the “Spring School”, in which she explored the city and made a zine together with the participants. Markus Hoffmann offered a workshop about the healing potential of plants in urban areas. On the first day of the Spring School, Axelle Gisserot from LUMA Arles gave a talk via Zoom about her artistic practice of dyeing with plants.

During the “Spring School”, Aušra Česnauskytė and Goda Verikaitė organized a three-day “walkshop” around Radialsystem. They looked at the city from a “neo-futuristic” perspective: attempting to translate our urban endeavors and speculations into a collective walkable narrative. In three consecutive day-long workshop sessions, Aušra Česnauskytė and Goda Verikaitė experimented together with their workshop group around the concept of degrowth and envisioned how it could relate to the micro-scale conditions in situ. As a result of the workshop, Neo-futuristic Walks and their workshop group led an performative public walk in the area surrounding Radialsystem. The walk ended with a cleansing ceremony led by Markus Hoffmann, in which those taking part in the walk were invited to wash their hands with soap made from the plants collected over the course of his workshop. Ulli Lust also presented the zine that her workshop participants created over the course of her workshop. This ceremony led into the opening of the second day of the Forecast Festival

Forecast conceptualized the Spring School together with Living Summer School, Markus Hoffmann, Ulli Lust and Aušra Česnauskytė and Goda Verikaitė. The cooperation with Living Summer school helped to facilitate the format of a summer school.

Forecast Festival 8 – Integration of LINA Fellows

Forecast offers artists and creative thinkers from anywhere in the world the chance to work with accomplished mentors toward bringing their projects to fruition. As an international mentorship program with annual editions, Forecast transcends neatly defined disciplines and genres to provide insight into creative production processes and carve out space for the questions on the minds of the next generation of trailblazers.

Each year, creative minds working in various disciplines are invited to submit project proposals via an open call. The selection process is two-tiered. First, the mentors carefully review all proposals and invite three nominees each to workshop with the mentor and present their ideas at the Forecast Forum in Berlin. At the Forum’s conclusion, each mentor chooses one mentee. The six mentees receive extended mentoring including a work-stay, in which mentor and mentee meet in person for up to two weeks of intensive exchange, usually with a host institution. At the end of the mentorship phase, the six mentees present their final productions to the public at the Forecast Festival.

The following mentors and mentees participated in Forecast’s eighth edition: poet Gabeba Baderoon (South Africa, mentor) and poet Marcela Huerta (Canada, mentee); drummer Greg Fox (USA, mentor) and Carlos Gutiérrez (Bolivia, mentee); visual artist Roee Rosen (Israel, mentor), Gustavo Gomes (Brazil, mentee) and Mari Kalabegashvili (Georgia, mentee); fashion designer Irakli Rusadze of Situationist (Georgia, mentor) and Aidan Jayson Peters (South Africa, mentee); and performance artist Yuya Tsukahara (Japan, mentor) and performer Victor Artiga Rodriguez (El Salvador, mentee).

The Forecast Festival 2024 marked the conclusion of Forecast’s eighth edition. During the Festival, the mentees showcased their work which they developed in the framework of the Forecast program together with their mentor. Additionally, the mentors gave insight into their own artistic practice. With fashion shows, installations, screenings, musical experimentation, talks and international artists, it was a great chance for the LINA Fellow to network and have artistic exchanges.

On the second day of the Festival, Neo-futuristic Walks offered a public walk around Radialsystem together with their “Spring School” workshop group, responding to historical and political aspects of the surrounding area of Radialsystem. This gave them the opportunity to showcase their artistic practice to the public audience of the Forecast Festival.

What did the LINA Fellow learn through the collaboration?

The LINA Fellows, while having developed artistic walks before, had the chance during the Spring School to develop a walk in collaboration with workshop participants – this collective approach was new to their practice. This gave them the chance try out artistic and pedagogical approaches of how to structure the “walkshop”. By inviting them to Berlin, they also had the chance to adapt their walk concept to the historically significant surroundings of Radialsystem.

Whom did the LINA Fellow meet and whom did they work with?

The LINA Fellow worked closely with Forecast alumni Markus Hoffmann and Ulli Lust, as well as with Elena Falomo and Jadd Hallaj from Living Summer School, and Freo Majer, artistic director of Forecast. Through sharing the workspace at Radialsystem during the week leading to the Festival, the LINA Fellow had the opportunity to build connections with the mentors and mentees, allowing them to network and have artistic exchanges with the interdisciplinary and international cohort of the eighth edition of Forecast.

Evaluation and outlook:

After the “Spring School” and Forecast Festival, we evaluated the experience together with Neo-futuristic Walks and the other facilitators. Neo-futuristic Walks gave us the feedback that they felt very integrated into the Forecast Festival and Spring School, and that they were actively part of the program. The “Spring School” participants also gave us feedback that the experience opened new ways of artistic work for them. For us from Forecast, the format of a summer school was a new way of working together with LINA Fellows, which we experienced as extremely fruitful due to the collaborative approach. The topic, Plants in Cityscapes, and the workshops within this thematic framework opened new ways of experiencing the urban architecture of Berlin.