For several editions now, Forecast has remained one of the most relevant platforms within Europe's cultural landscape: a place where unfinished ideas are not treated as weaknesses, but as material for exchange. Returning to Radialsystem from July 16 to 19, Forecast Festival marks its 10th anniversary with four days of performance, sound, screenings, visual art, design, stand-up comedy, workshops, and projects still taking shape in public.
At the centre of this year's edition are the selected mentorship candidates, chosen through an open call that received hundreds of submissions from around the world. Throughout the festival, they will present works-in-progress across different fields, extending Forecast's commitment to process, dialogue, and experimentation. The programme is less concerned with finished statements than with what happens when ideas are tested through conversation, friction, and live exchange.
Over the last decade, Forecast has built a rare space where speculative design, performance, sound, cinema, comedy, and research can meet without being forced into a single language. Across performances, screenings, installations, workshops, stand-up sets, and live presentations, the festival encourages conversations between disciplines that rarely coexist so fluidly elsewhere. It does not hide the mechanisms behind creation or wait for projects to become fully resolved before presenting them. What audiences encounter are ideas still carrying contradiction, instability, and the possibility of change.
At METAL, we have followed Forecast closely over recent editions, including through conversations with former mentors Hussein Chalayan and Fiona Raby. Reflecting on her experience within the programme, Raby spoke to us about the "richness of experiences" generated by layering sound, movement, atmosphere, fiction, and material experimentation across the mentees' projects. Chalayan described the mentorship process as a relationship built around "lots of ideas, lots of exchange", highlighting the warmth and mutual respect that emerged through dialogue with the artists he mentored.
This year's edition continues that spirit through six mentorship fields led by internationally recognized creatives working across performance, sound, visual culture, speculative design, comedy, and film. Sri Lankan writer and comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa mentors Playing With Risk alongside Siming Lu, Brandon Aguirre, and Xabiso Vili, while British performance maker Tom Cassani leads Authentic Deception with Hsiang-Sheng Teng, Christopher Yarnell, and Emilie Largier. Artist and filmmaker Keren Cytter oversees Constructing Delusions with Anna Flanagan, Nadir Sönmez, and Mahesh Subramaniam, while Kazakh multimedia artist Almagul Menlibayeva mentors Unruly Images with Ana Mikadze, Camila Flores-Fernández, and Poyuan Juan.
Australian sci-fi artist and body architect Lucy McRae captures part of the edition's wider mood through Introspective Futurism, developed with Jiaqing Mo, Amy Chiao, and Lena Becerra. We have spoken with McRae on several occasions throughout the last decade, following her ongoing exploration of speculative futures and the body as a site of transformation. Her research-driven practice asks what it means to exist in a "post-natural" world shaped by synthetic identities and shifting perceptions of human experience. Here, futurism becomes psychological and bodily rather than only technological.
Sound also occupies a central place through The Distant Mirror, led by Ukrainian composer and sound artist Heinali alongside participating musicians and sound artists Pablo V Cazares, Anna Ivchenko, and Mariana Carrilho. Together with vocalist Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, Heinali presents Hildegard, a reinterpretation of Hildegard von Bingen's compositions that combines Ukrainian folk singing, modular synthesis, and medieval polyphony. Across the festival, listening appears as an embodied experience capable of carrying memory, displacement, ritual, and collective continuity.
Visual culture appears equally unstable. Menlibayeva's installation Water Older Than the Sun (Caspian), created with Suad Gara and recently presented in a collateral exhibition of the 61st Art Biennial, anchors a section where image-making becomes a fragmented territory shaped by mythology, historical tension, and political imagination. Meanwhile, Cytter's Meltdown trilogy uses fractured narratives and emotional collapse to examine relationships unfolding inside increasingly chaotic environments. In both cases, images stop functioning as stable documents and begin operating more like emotional architectures built from contradiction and disorientation.
Beyond the mentorship showcases, the anniversary edition expands through workshops and exploratory walks led by fellows of the LINA network, alongside appearances by alumni from previous Forecast Mentorships editions. The full programme is now online, with festival passes, day passes, and workshop tickets available.
