Forecast 10

If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember we introduced the 10th edition of this Berlin-based platform earlier this year, and just a few days ago, we caught up with one of its mentors, the legendary Hussein Chalayan, to explore his ideas on performance, subtlety, and disruption. Forecast isn’t your typical mentorship programme; it’s a space where emerging artists work closely with established voices across disciplines to push ideas into new, often unexpected directions. After a packed public forum weekend at Radialsystem, the six final tandems are set, and what they’re developing is already reshaping how we think about creation.

Each mentor selected one artist to accompany them through the coming months, and the results are striking. Lulu Obermayer is working with Wojciech Rybicki on Three Sisters. Pas de mark., a piece that takes the opera canon apart and reimagines it with layered tension and care. Electronic composer Sote is guiding Corin Ileto’s Resonance, where Filipino kulintang instruments and digital textures meet in a richly grounded sonic exploration. Diane Cescutti’s Gods of Calculation, chosen by Ruth Patir, presents African twin deities as supercomputers, not as imitation AIs, but as a radical proposal for a more inclusive technological future. These aren’t polished showpieces, they’re living proposals, open to growth and friction.

The other mentor-mentee pairings are equally compelling. Elaine Mitchener is continuing with María Gabriela Rubio Hernández, whose practice connects poetry, voice, movement, and environmental grief in a language that feels both deeply personal and politically charged. Bethan Hughes is working with James Richards on Shadowing, a project that draws from her Berlin neighbourhood to explore ideas of presence, surveillance, and memory through sound and visual performance. And Chalayan is developing further work with Kihako Narisawa, whose durational performances use silence, repetition, and everyday gestures to unsettle our sense of narrative. These works often operate on the edges of perception, rewarding patience and rethinking what it means to perform or communicate.

Now, the six artists enter the next stage: a series of residencies in Berlin where they’ll shape their projects into final works to premiere at the Forecast Festival in March of 2026. What makes Forecast distinct is its commitment to process, to letting things evolve rather than forcing them into predefined formats. If this edition is any indication, what’s coming isn’t just a new generation of work; it’s a new way of thinking about how art moves through the world.