Language – Rhythm – Identity – Image – Punk – Performance: This describes the creative spectrum of the 8th edition of “Forecast”. The festival programme ranges from performances and installations to readings, talks and workshops. Six projects by artists, performers, musicians, and poets will be premiered at the festival after ten months of collaborating with renowned mentors.

For further information www.forecast-platform.com/forecast-festival-2024/

Friday, 15 March

From 6:30 pm:

„From Questions to Images“
Mentor  Roee Rosen (Israel)
Mentee  Mari Kalabegashvili (Georgia)

Mari Kalabegashvili captures Tbilisi’s male‑dominated subcultures through the lens of her camera, and observes the urban environment of Tbilisi as an extreme playground in If You Catch My Drift. The installation is accessible all evening.

7:30 pm

„Rhythmic Excavation“ 
Mentor  Greg Fox (USA)
Mentee  Carlos Gutiérrez (Bolivia)

Live session by musicians Carlos Gutiérrez and Greg Fox.

Composer Carlos Gutiérrez will premiere the site-aware sound installation Infinite Warp and Weft, an audience-activated temporal network of several interdependent rhythmic levels. The work is accessible all evening.

8:30 pm 

Mari Kalabegashvili, mentor Roee Rosen, and Tbilisi Architecture Biennale co‑curator Tinatin Gurgenidze in conversation

9 pm

„Sartorial Identities“
Mentor  Irakli Rusadze (Georgia)
Mentee  Aidan Jayson Peters (South Africa)

With a showcase entitled Singular Craft: Couture in Focus, fashion designer Irakli Rusadze homes in on a single item from his collection to highlight the craftsmanship, expertise, and hours of labor that go into producing a single contemporary couture piece, inspired by traditional Georgian garb. “Every stitch and every choice of material becomes a deliberate expression of an artistic vision, rooted in cultural influences and shaped by a desire to bridge the gap between the past and the present.”

Aidan Jayson Peters debuts his upcycled collection DEADSTOCK–Life of a Garment, which highlights the ingenuity of working with the discarded products sent from Europe to Africa.

Closing set by Greg Fox

Saturday, 16 March

5 pm

„Voluptuous Silence and Sociality in Poetry“
Mentorin  Gabeba Baderoon (South Africa)
Mentee  Marcela Huerta (Canada)

Poet Gabeba Baderoon will read from new work, a verse memoir about concussion titled Autobiography of Sand: Relief Map of A Drifting Mind. The memoir draws on an archive of medical records, doctors’ notes, pain diaries, memoirs of illness, research on concussion, and colonial diaries. Formally mirroring its subject, the manuscript is structured not into chapters but fragments, hesitancies, and hauntings. Almost discernable beneath this repetitive lexicon are the unplanned jottings from which poetry is born. 

Writer Marcela Huerta creates an empathetic and collaborative poetic portrait of her mother, Yolanda Huerta, a refugee of the 1973 Chilean coup. Over several months, they traveled to the sites of Yolanda’s refugee story and participated in somatic practices to find new ways of narrating the histories that have shaped their relationship. Followed by a conversation with Gabeba Baderoon.

6:30 pm

„Post Punk Performance“
Mentor  Yuya Tsukahara (Japan)
Mentee  Victor Artiga Rodriguez (El Salvador)

Performer, choreographer, and experimental performance festival director Yuya Tsukahara will enact a conceptual activation of the audience and venue in preparation for his mentee’s contribution.

Victor Artiga Rodriguez stages improvisations around pollution and bodies in his performative project Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages. Together with co-creators and performers Carla Anacker, Edgar Lessig, and Icaro Lopez de Mesa Moyano, the four examine how human and non-human bodies are impacted by climate change and water pollution on a micropolitical level.

7:30 pm

„Troubled Humor and Tainted Beauty“
Mentor  Roee Rosen (Israel)
Mentees  Gustavo Gomes (Brazil/Germany)

Gustavo Gomes will premiere his film Manhandle, a documentary about sexual violence against men that reveals the complex thresholds between fantasy, guilt, shame, and dissociation.

Artist Roee Rosen will share his work The Dust Channel, which he describes as a cultural exquisite corpse: an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias. Coproduced by documenta 14.