Soft Power Festival—Day 1

✦

10am—noon

Kava   |   Hall 2  ·  Radio—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

✦

11am—1pm

Opening Ceremony: Ritual Installation by Caique Tizzi in collaboration with Fortuna Forest, featuring Rachel Lyn

Caique Tizzi, Fortuna Forest, Rachel Lyn   |   Hall 2  ·  Activation

The festival opens with a tea ceremony and soundscape that transforms the table-stage into a site of ritual, gathering, and shared experience. Blurring sculpture, performance, and hospitality, the work invites visitors to activate the installation through eating, marking the beginning of the programme. Caique Tizzi is a Brazilian, Berlin-based artist and chef who uses food as a medium for storytelling and for exploring new forms of togetherness. His dinners, collective experiences and edible installations have been presented at institutions and art events worldwide. Fortuna Forest, founded by Yulia Roth and Laura Iriondo, creates spaces for reconnecting with the natural world, bringing together experimental sound, performance and food.

✦

noon—1pm

Food as a Cultural Practice: Memory, Migration and the Politics of Nourishment

Caique Tizzi and Akshita Garud, in conversation with María Inés Plaza Lazo   |   Hall 2  ·  Refuge Worldwide Breakfast Show

Food travels. With it travel seeds, spices, recipes, bodies and ways of inhabiting the world. Caique Tizzi's practice attends to non-endemic plants and the ways landscapes are transformed when species are moved, cultivated and made to belong elsewhere. Akshita Garud turns to Indian spices, tracing the routes through which flavour became entangled with trade, colonial expansion, extraction and the global circulation of commodities. Between plant migration and the histories of spice, the conversation considers how globalization enters everyday life through what grows around us and what reaches our palate—a record of movements that are never only culinary, but also of unequal access, displacement and extraction.

✦

noon—1pm

Soft Strength: On Care, Presence and the Power of Attention

Lukas Feireiss   |   Hall 1  ·  Performative Lecture

Berlin-based curator, coach, and educator Lukas Feireiss takes the tarot card ›Strength‹ as the starting point for an exploration of power that is not defined by hardness, control or domination. Moving between personal biography, art and medicine, masculinity and embodied practice, he asks what it means to meet intensity with presence, care and discernment. Combining visual references, personal reflections and a participatory experience, the lecture considers how softness can become a form of strength without losing structure.

✦

12:00 – 16:00

SPY Story: Art Practices to Counter-Fiction Disinformation

led by Dalia Maini and Arts of the Working Class   |   Hall 1B  ·  Workshop

Disinformation is often understood as a problem of false or misleading content. This workshop approaches it instead as a question of infrastructure: who controls visibility, who determines which narratives circulate, and how funding, institutions and networks shape what can be seen, said and believed. Using the art world as a legible, smaller-scale field of investigation, participants examine the dynamics through which galleries, collectors, institutions and critics produce visibility and cultural value. Beginning September 9 and continuing through the festival, the workshop combines live fieldwork, observation, interviews and critical discussion, developed collectively into zine drafts published at its conclusion on September 13. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA).

✦

noon—3pm

Stitching Resilience—Mending as Ritual & The Community Quilt

Buki Akomolafe   |   Sonnenraum  ·  Hands-on Workshop

Buki Akomolafe is the founder of the Berlin-based fashion label Buki Akomolafe (est. 2016), a graduate of HTW Berlin, whose practice—shaped by her upbringing in Nigeria and her father's agricultural project VPP Nigeria—centres eco-conscious materials and locally handcrafted garments.

✦

1—3pm

Myriam & Jack Murray-Brown   |   Hall 2  ·  Radio—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

✦

1—2pm

Guided Tour   |  Sonnenraum  ·  Hall 1  ·  Hall 2  ·  Hall 1B

✦

2—3pm

The Feeling of Berlin: How People Shape a City

Cynthia Mensah-Neglokpe & Daria Suvorova-Konstandin, in conversation with Danielle de Picciotto & Heinz ›Cookie‹ Gindullis   |   Hall 1  ·  Conversation

Artist and Love Parade co-founder Danielle de Picciotto, Cookies founder Heinz ›Cookie‹ Gindullis, and cultural curators Daria Suvorova-Konstandin and Cynthia Mensah-Neglokpe consider what gives Berlin its distinct identity, how culture emerges through everyday acts of gathering and exchange, and why the most enduring influence often begins with something as simple as bringing people together.

✦

3—4pm

Marta Forsberg   |   Hall 2  ·  Radio—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

✦

3—3.45pm

What's at Stake for Berlin Club Culture?

Cristina Plett (Tagesspiegel), David Höhne (Haus der Visionäre) & Kai Sachse (Clubcommission Berlin e.V.), in conversation with Pia von Wersebe (The Pioneer)   |   Hall 1  ·  Clubcommission & DLD Music School—held in German

A discussion of current developments in club culture and its significance for democracy: the social role of clubs and cultural spaces, current challenges facing the scene, and the political framework needed to support and sustain Berlin's club culture.

✦

3.45—5pm

The Berlin Club Culture Election Debate + Q&A

Steffen Krach (SPD), Werner Graf (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), Elif Eralp (Die Linke) & Christian Goiny (CDU), in conversation with Marcel Weber (Clubcommission Berlin e.V.)   |   Hall 1  ·  Clubcommission & DLD Music School—held in German language

Berlin election lead candidates and party representatives address how the city's political parties position themselves on the future of club culture—the ideas and strategies they hold for preserving and developing Berlin's club landscape, and the role of club culture at a time when democracy is being questioned.

✦

5—6pm

Mariuccia Secol: ›Unraveling‹—Book Launch 

Monika Branicka in conversation with María Inés Plaza Lazo   |   Hall 1B  ·  Conversation broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

Marking the Berlin launch of Mariuccia Secol: Unraveling—the first comprehensive monograph on the Italian artist and activist—Monika Branicka (Director and Chief Curator, Muzeum Susch) and María Inés Plaza Lazo (curator, writer and co-curator of Soft Power Festival) discuss Secol's radical, more than seventy-year practice spanning painting, textiles, sculpture, social critique and feminist activism, and the work required to keep such practices from the margins of art history. Published with Hatje Cantz on the occasion of Unraveling at Muzeum Susch.

✦

5—6pm

Obelix |   Hall 2  ·  Radio—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

✦

6—7pm

The First Amphora 

Susana AbdulMajid   |   Hall 2  ·  Performance—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

Beginning in the garden with a vessel once given to Susana AbdulMajid by Anahita Sadighi, the performance traces memory and friendship as acts of carrying—through water, movement, voice and song—moving with the audience into Hall 2 and between the Tigris, ancient narratives and the body as a living archive. Susana AbdulMajid is a Berlin-based artist, writer and researcher working at the intersection of theatre, literature and Arab Studies, whose interdisciplinary practice is rooted in long-term research between Germany and Iraq.

✦

7—8pm

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (Live)    |  Hall 1  

✦

7—9pm

soo:k  |   Hall 2  ·  Radio—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

✦

8—11pm

Spice as Soft Power 

Akshita Garud (Two Odd)   |   Hall 2  ·  Installation and Conversation with Anahita Sadighi, broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

An installation confronting the paradox of Indian food's global popularity and its colonial flattening into ›generic curries.‹ One side presents khakhra flatbreads with three chutneys arranged along an ascending spectrum of heat, restoring the intensity diluted by the British Empire into sugary jam. The other engages the radical power of olfaction: agarbatti pierced into living fruit, reclaiming South Asian scents often dismissed elsewhere as ›too strong.‹ Together the elements assert food and fragrance as living archives of dignity, identity and resistance.

✦

8—10.30pm

Katayoun   |  Hall 1  

✦

9—10pm

eioo |   Hall 2  ·  Radio—broadcast on Refuge Worldwide

✦

10.30—11pm

douniah: Poetry & Sound Collages   |   Hall 1  

✦

11pm—1am

Matthias Reiling   |  Hall 1  

✦

11pm—1am

Jaako from Trevor Deep Jr.   |  Hall 1  

✦

5—7.30am

Hesam Ayat   |  Hall 1  

✦

7.30—10am

Lenny Mailleau   |  Hall 1  

✦