In By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road, the programme unfolds through a rhythm of High Tide and Low Tide moments. This rhythm is not only about pacing, but about reconfiguring the conditions under which knowledges, technologies, and relations can be generated by coming together.

The High Tide / Low Tide distinction functions not only as a metaphor but as a method of transportation, a way of moving through the programme. Across both tides, the festival intentionally moves from content to context, and from speakers to systems. Rather than centring singular voices or finished statements, the programme invites attention towards the conditions, infra·structures, and relational ecologies through which practices emerge.

High Tide marks moments of collective convergence. These are scheduled events that temporarily take over the space,Practices become amplified, staged, and audible, drawing visitors into a shared focal moment. High Tide contributions operate at full presence performative, discursive, or sonic activating the space as a charged node of attention and encounter.

Low Tide is a state of shared holding. Here, the space opens for talanoa-like gatherings or hanging shaped by visitors and contributors together. Exchange happens through proximity rather than spectacle, through conversation, listening, tinkering, and co-presence. Access to stage areas, holding-structures, and hanging-structures remains fluid, allowing practices to circulate, pause, and recombine at small to mid scale.

Together, we believe these tides help expand the speaker–audience dichotomy. Rather than one-directional transmission, the festival offers conditions for multi-lateral exchange, where visitors, contributors, and infra·structures all participate in shaping meaning.

The programme is made not only by invited guest contributors, but especially through the constellations formed between them and in relation to visitors, who are invited to take part in a shared process of collective navigation.

This approach is motivated by an ongoing exploration of formats: asking how different spatial, temporal, and relational arrangements might condition us differently how we listen, how we speak, how we relate to technologies and to one another.

We are inviting guest contributors to share their perspectives across multiple forms, scales, and degrees of visibility and intimacy. A contributor might appear as a performer, a facilitator, a listener, a caretaker of a space, or a quiet presence embedded in a longer process. Practices may surface publicly during High Tide, and then continue in more porous, conversational, or durational forms during Low Tide.

Rather than isolated events, the festival forms a constellation for collective navigation and prompting a carrier net of practices, tools, and orientations. Meaning emerges through movement between tides, through encounters that repeat, shift, and deepen over time.

In this way, By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road is less of a programme to be consumed than a shared environment to be navigated together.

The structure of By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road is deeply shaped by the ways we have been netting with artists and contributors long before the festival (gathering) in Berlin takes place. Rather than responding to a single context or set of conditions, we formed interTropical research Netting Groups across different knots in the tropics – conceived as recursive micro-iterations of the festival itself – responding to same same but different realities, ecologies, and technological conditions.

These Netting Groups took place in Papua New Guinea (September 2025), Thailand (October), and along the Swahili Coast (November), and were intended to meaningfully develop the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road within its endemic contexts. This approach also resisted a familiar model in which Global North institutions position practitioners in exile by expecting their contributions to take place primarily in Europe or the US. Instead, we reworked the festival’s timelines and budget to engage practitioners where they already were, as a way of intercepting some of the cultural and material mobility hierarchies that shape artistic exchange.

These situated processes informed not only individual contributions, but the overall logic of the festival: how it moves, how it holds, and how it convenes. Constellations were not assembled to produce predefined outcomes, but to test how practices might resonate, clash, or align when brought into relation shaping the festival as a relational gestural system rather than a sequence of presentations.

This Netting Group logic is extended into Berlin itself. A number of the stewards of these Netting Groups will be in attendance to represent the delegations they attended to and to present traces from the processes, helping to contextualise the experiment in practice. Guest contributors are invited to participate across multiple facets and scales, and to stay with the festival for its duration rather than arriving for a single, isolated contribution. In practical terms, this includes shared living arrangements such as collective apartments rather than individual hotel rooms so that processes of collective navigation can continue beyond formal programme moments and stretch across social, domestic, and informal time.

This mode of collaboration continues throughout the festival. Artists and contributors shift between roles and formats, moving across High Tide and Low Tide moments, and remaining in dialogue with one another and with visitors. The festival thus operates as a shared environment of ongoing exchange, where collaboration is not a preparatory phase but an active condition unfolding before, during, and beyond the festival itself.

Rather than offering a single recommended route, By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road invites visitors to orient and dis·orient themselves gradually, through encounter, attention, and return. The festival is conceived as a shared environment rather than a linear schedule, and orientation emerges through movement rather than instruction. This approach resonates with Dionne Brand’s prose-poetic Map to the Door of No Return, where orientation is not given in advance but requires a generous act of imagination – finding one’s way toward a site of rupture, and learning how to remember, return, and remain in relation.

Visitors may choose to begin with a High Tide moment a performance, concert, screening, or collective gathering where the energy of the festival is most condensed and practices surface in amplified form. Others may start in Low Tide spaces, spending time in studios, installations, Techne·Shrines, sound fields, or informal gathering areas, allowing the festival’s rhythms and conversations to reveal themselves more slowly.

Throughout the festival, holding·structures and hanging·structures remain accessible as points of pause and recalibration. These spaces support lingering, return visits, and informal exchanges, and can serve as anchors when the programme feels dense or unfamiliar. They echo the festival’s repair-compassed infrastructure, which attends to histories of relational rupture – particularly those shaped by water, ports, and forced movement—without seeking to resolve them into a single narrative.

Orientation is also shaped through collective navigation. Contributors are present across the festival’s duration, and visitors are encouraged to enter into conversation, ask questions, listen, and follow threads that resonate. Many paths through the programme are formed relationally by chance encounters, shared meals, or being drawn back to a space multiple times. In this sense, orientation happens with others, and over time.
Rather than trying to see everything, visitors are invited to move at the speed of trust with the tides: to allow moments of intensity and moments of openness to alternate, and to trust partial views, unfinished conversations, and repeated returns. Visitors can also begin orienting themselves before, during, or after the festival through a mix of poetry and protocol, with a suggested syllabi that inform the tech·styles and sensibilities of By The Mango Belt & Tamarind Road. These include Techgnosis by Erik Davis, Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown, and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

In this way, the festival reveals itself not all at once, but through accumulation, resonance, and lived experience: a festival of gestures.

Some of the constellations we’re most excited about are the ones that are not time-bound. In terms of festival infra·structure, we look forward to seeing how the temporary architectures we have rendered are inhabited and brought to life. Many of our gestures aim to stretch, bend, and playfully interrogate our understandings of time•space cyber•space logics.

The Cyberspace Belonging to Kenya is a nested-venue located in the appendix area to Betonhalle – a space whose title is a name that comes out of a Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Bill that was recently passed by the government of Kenya. In this bill, whose primary purpose is to give the Kenyan government leeway to persecute digital activists, the domain of its purview is declared as being the “cyberspace belonging to Kenya” – an imagined, arguably boundless territory that we intend on invoking in silent green and populating with works by artists from the Philippines, Afrabia, and beyond.

After years of fatigue induced by screens pointing our attention towards more channels than our body’s flows have – or should – evolved to accommodate, IRL streams will this year be prioritised over URL equivalents. By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road is a place where we hope people gather to listen to one another, and then listen to themselves. This commitment to presence means the festival takes place beyond the mediation of live-streams and video recording, while remaining resonant through sound: audio will be available for people to attend and attune both during and after the festival dates. We invite any attendees who have radio broadcasts of any scale – personal, collective, private, public or self-hosted – to join us in distributing presence through sound.