The interdisciplinary creative platform will present each of the six mentees work at its festival next month.
Having shared an open call last February, Forecast‘s latest round of its mentorship programme – which is dedicated to nurturing creatives and matching them up with expert mentors – will come to fruition at Forecast Festival from 15-16 March at Radialsystem in Berlin. Each of the six artists in the 2023-2024 cohort will present the work they have been developing over the past year.
This year the mentors include South-African poet, editor, academic and memoirist Gabeba Baderoon, Japanese performer, director and choreographer Yuya Tsukahara and Greg Fox, a multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist and teacher based in New York. The other mentors are Roee Rosen, who is an artist, filmmaker and writer and also Iralki Rusadze, the creative director of Tbilisi-based fashion brand SITUATIONIST.
Among the chosen six mentees is fashion designer Aidan Jayson Peters (aka Klein Muis), whose project looks at the lifecycle of a garment examining the environmental impact of the fashion industry. There’s also Gustavo Gomes, who will develop his theatrical examination of sexual violence against men into a film.
The other creatives amongst the latest cohort include Tbilisi-based artist Mari Kalabegashvili, Victor Artiga Rodriguez and his post punk performance, Bolivian composer, performer and researcher Carlos Gutiérrez and Marcela Huerta, who will present a poetic collaboration with her mother. Head to Forecast’s website for further details about the mentees and their projects.
The final productions of all six projects will be showcased at Forecast Festival next month. Find out more here.
Forecast aims to emphasize the significance of autonomy within art making by allowing artists the opportunity to pursue their projects under mentorship and away from economic and politicised cultural production. We caught up with the programme’s artistic director, Freo Majer, to find out more about the programme.
What is Forecast?
Forecast is an international platform dedicated to facilitating, mentoring, and promoting creative practices, which are shared with the public in our annual festivals. With Forecast’s global open calls, we seek remarkable creative minds and find out what they are thinking about and what they want to work on. Once we have identified promising endeavours, we pair their authors with mentors and/or collaboration partners and provide access to knowledge, material, and funds while accompanying the projects’ development toward their realization in our annual festivals.
Tell us about how you select your mentors: what is the process, what are you looking for, what are you hoping they can offer?
Our selection of mentors for each edition is a curatorial decision regularly discussed with the Forecast team and advisors from a wide range of disciplines. It is influenced strongly by recommendations from our current and former collaboration partners, the Forecast mentors and, above all, from the nominees and mentees of our current and former editions.
We always aim for a composition of mentoring fields that we consider balanced and timely from the perspective of different creatives who might benefit from our support. At the same time, we are very much interested in working methods, genres, and techniques that are currently gaining momentum and importance in the art world. We need mentors that are able to identify with ideas, forms of expression, and styles that are not their own. It goes without saying that Forecast mentors cannot be self-centered, patronizing, or dogmatic. On the contrary, each and every one of them must be curious, warmhearted, and above all generous. We expect our mentors to offer advice, encouragement, insight into their experiences, learnings, as well as their struggles and failures, and to grant access to their own networks.
Likewise, fill us in on the decision-making behind the projects selected for Forecast’s eighth edition: What was it about these artists and creatives, and their projects, that stood out?
The selection of the final projects is made by each mentor individually. Yet of course the mentors discuss their criteria and decision-making process with their fellow mentors and with me as Artistic Director. There actually are some parallels between this edition’s mentees: they all have a very specific way of watching and listening. These artists are extremely curious and move through the world with sharp senses, and at the same time, they are patient and gentle in how they create relations and build collaborations.
The six projects are based on authentic and often unpredictable encounters with other individuals or groups, depicting or retelling their stories. The projects of Forecast 8 thrive on the trust our artists have been able to build up, both in themselves and their collaborators. To name a few, there is a photographer embedding herself in a male-dominated subculture. She had to find those spaces, understand the communication, group dynamics, and rituals that would help her gain access and to get accepted as “the one with the camera”. There’s a dancer and choreographer who found ways to unearth, process, and transform traumatic experiences together with survivors of sexual violence, and a fashion designer creating for his generation, representing a nascent cultural identity in South Africa. His aesthetics meld an international outlook with the hugely diverse and inventive scene around the biggest street market in Johannesburg, where discarded garments from Europe end up.
What is it you hope to offer and provide mentees via the mentorship scheme, with a particular focus on this year’s edition?
We have the ambition that our participants experience new ways of thinking, new methods, and also a career boost that they could not have without Forecast. In this particular edition, the composition of the mentorship tandems is also culturally very diverse, each providing both mentor and mentee with the chance to learn from a culture that they may not have known very deeply before this collaboration.
