In a time when digital systems claim to connect us but encroach on privacy, control, and consent, transmediale 2026 stages a reckoning with networks. Installed inside of CANK Neukölln — a whopping 8,000 square metres and five storeys of utter Brutalist concrete mass, the festival’s main exhibition By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road, curated by Neema Githere and Juan Pablo García Sossa, materialises hidden infrastructures and interrogates data’s hidden labour, reminding visitors that the digital is neither immaterial nor autonomous.
The former 1960s department store, where the exhibition takes place, closed in 2012, was temporarily used to house refugees from 2016 to 2018, and has functioned as a cultural venue since 2024. Despite its reclamation, the building still carries an uncanny air of abandonment with only minimal restoration. On entering the massive ground floor, the space is dark and cold. A central double escalator stands motionless but manages to impose its old logic and internalised choreography: one side up, the other side down.
The first encounter is a green laser-projected animation that beckons like a hypnotic beacon in the shadows. Two figures fly on a magic Persian carpet. Kasra Jalilipour’s Journey to You conjures hidden queerness in 19th-century Iran. Figures adapted from Lizzat Al-Nisa, a richly illustrated sex manuscript, are reimagined in intimate gestures that loop in trance, reframing suppressed histories into visible, circulating forms. The magic carpet becomes a time machine for queer temporal mobility, where erased pasts and imagined futures coexist in a luminous, looping present.
In front of the department store’s floor-to-ceiling display windows is another carpet. Dimly lit and equipped with headphones, it is visible to passersby on the street. This interactive kilim rug, handcrafted from reclaimed wool and woven with “conductive fibres” as well as small embedded nodes, reacts to touch, triggering human sounds and conversations. Making contact with each touchpoint is like changing to a new radio station, but the piece demands presence, because as soon as the finger loses contact, the rug returns to silence.
Situated at the intersection of craft and computation, Saba Arat’s Yörük explores how cultural knowledge is encoded, circulated, and experienced. While visitors can play with the rug, their interactions also reveal tensions between individual agency and the preconfigured logic of the system.
Just behind, a kaleidoscopic video projection documents the informal minibuses of Ghana’s streets. TroTro Life from @thistrotrolife is an abstraction of living social infrastructures. The video layers footage and turns perspective into pattern, mirroring the improvisational logic of informal transport. Drivers, passengers, and vehicle interiors produce a captivating visual rhythm that is barely decodable without the soundtrack.
Traversing the escalator-turned-staircase, a corner of the exhibition on the second floor provides another tactile lesson in interconnection. A series of hammocks — soft, swaying refuges — invite visitors to have a rest. At first, it feels like a private pause, but each hammock is linked, so the movement of one ripples across the network. When only a few remain occupied, one person rising to leave causes the last hammocks to sink suddenly. In this simple, embodied gesture, the installation visualises interconnectivity in a way we can all understand. Our actions, however small, are entangled with the experiences of other people. Titled Redário — drawing on the Brazilian Portuguese word rede, which means both “network” and “hammock” — the hammocks propose what it might mean to design networks that hold space for each other.
Many works in the exhibition are interactive, yet some feel incomplete without experiencing them as part of a festival workshop. One such installation is Lee Tau Tung’s The Body’s Tale of Mercy & Vengeance (BOTAMEVE), a floor mat installation that operates as a feminist “fight club” where participants confront the mercies and harms their bodies have endured — whether rooted in sexuality, disability, or other lived realities. Conceived as a script as opposed to a static artwork, the experience is intended to position the body as a site of encrypted knowledge, memory, and resistance, transforming vulnerabilities into collective practices of attunement.
Simon Speiser’s Cuerdas del Manglar — Strings from the Mangrove layers speculative physics into the l histories of Ecuador’s Esmeraldas’ maroon communities. Holograms etched into metal sheets reflect cultural memory and ancestral gold-mining practices, while black holes are superimposed onto shipwrecks that enabled early Afro-Ecuadorian maroon settlements, linking cosmology, survival, resistance, and syncretic ritual in an immersive experience.
Grounding the room is Rare Earths, a multi-media installation by Guely Morató that transforms extraction into diminutive intimacy. An edible sculpture of salt and sugar invites visitors to serve themselves, turning a domestic gesture into a reflection of large-scale territorial exploitation. The work evokes the Andean Lithium Triangle — spanning Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile — where centuries of silver, copper, and gold mining now converge with the global rush for lithium, a key resource in so-called ‘clean energy’ narratives.
Sound frequencies recorded in mining sites erode the edible landscape, translating planetary extraction into a literal disintegration of form. The installation amplifies the silences left by technocolonialism: displaced communities, degraded ecosystems, and appropriated resources. By implicating viewers in the act of consumption and removal, awareness of environmental and social extraction is amplified, collapsing the distance between global processes and individual responsibility.
Federico Pérez Villoro’s video installation No Distance traces the hidden material infrastructure of global connectivity through submarine fibre-optic cables that carry the internet underneath the ocean floor. Satellite images and tracking protocol recite the physical scars of these networks, from buried trenches to corporate and governmental secrecy. The illusion of immateriality is exposed through labour, extraction, and environmental consequences, like leaving expired and disused cables in the ocean permanently, in cases when it would be more harmful to remove them than to simply leave them where they are.
The video pairs precise coordinates with reflections on water as a planetary force: rivers, oceans, and even bodily fluids resist containment, undeterred by cartographic borders. By setting rigid infrastructures against fluid, the work reframes connectivity as a political and ecological problem rather than a neutral technical achievement, asking how we might relate to networks as well as to one another without collapsing into abstraction or technological determinism.
A voiceover probes the systems that sustain the illusion of the internet’s immateriality, linking our complicity with colonial mapping and the manufactured proximity of digital technologies. By contrasting hidden infrastructures with water’s uncontrollable flows, the work exposes the material and planetary costs of connectivity. These tensions extend to governance: in Europe and North America, sovereignty is often reduced to cloud control and AI competitiveness, masking the energy, minerals, and labour these systems depend on, while erasing communal forms of self-determination.
The viewer is left with questions. Who decides if and how a system enters a territory? Who controls access? And who retains the right to refuse connection?
The theme of transmediale 2026 grows out of last year’s focus on (near) near but — far, which examined how algorithmic systems rearrange proximity, creating strange intimacies while eroding forms of closeness. This year’s iteration extends that inquiry beyond human–machine relations toward the wider question of networks: how technological, social, and infrastructural systems organise distance, relation, and dependency.
The exhibition at CANK Neukölln represents only one part of this larger constellation, which also unfolded in a workshop and event programme at Silent Green in Berlin-Wedding and Dong Xuan Centre, Berlin-Lichtenberg. In recent years, transmediale has sometimes treated its exhibitions as extended curatorial projects that outlast the festival itself, allowing for longer engagement and deeper encounters with artworks.
Past examples include ever elusive (2017), End to End (2020), and a model, a map, a fiction (2023). As recently as 2024, this is perfect perfect perfect ran for two and a half months and was free of charge, while Uncensored Lilac opened even earlier and remained on view until mid-April.
Unfortunately, this year’s exhibition carried an entrance fee and ran for only a few days, reflecting a broader contraction inside Berlin’s cultural landscape. The public sector continues to feel the impact of last year’s €130 million cultural funding cut: roughly 12–13% of the city’s arts & culture budget, which likely impacted the transmediale’s scale, duration, and programming capacity. So while the festival is publicly funded through Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture and Europe alongside federal support from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, in the end, it’s the visitor who pays the price.
In this sense, the festival’s focus on networks is not simply about digital culture but about the material and institutional conditions of its own existence. These are the regimes through which connection is produced and governed for the public. And if it is for the public, how does this align with the infrastructures it interrogates, like cloud services, data centres, platforms, and logistical networks, which are largely controlled by private interests and operate in opacity? What remains unresolved is on whose terms it is organised, at whose expense it is maintained, and where the space for refusal or reconfiguration might still emerge.
Transmediale reminds us that while networked technologies promise seamless connection, their seedy underbelly is systematically hidden, and not looking at it doesn’t make it not be there. To be connected is to be implicated. Yet, as the defunct escalator reminds us, these rules are not absolute: go ahead, walk up the downside.
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All photos & GiFs Camille Moreno @camillebeaucoup
