Soft Power Festival

Initiated by Anahita Sadighi, Soft Power understands art as a collective practice that can create spaces for encounter, resonance and new forms of living together. Its curatorial choreography follows a temporal progression in nine chapters: Arriving → Listening → Remembering/Imagining → Gathering → Hosting → Ritualising → Resonating → Celebrating → Becoming. It describes a process in which cultural and political influence emerges not through force, but through encounter, shared experience and the conditions that allow people to connect.

Curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo and Anahita Sadighi, the exhibition forms the conceptual core of the festival. Bringing together around 40 artists working across contemporary art discourses, crafts, performative and food activations, it approaches soft power as something that can be exercised from below and across borders. It takes Joseph Nye's influential concept as its starting point—and its problem. Coined at the end of the Cold War, ›soft power‹ described influence exercised through attraction rather than coercion: through culture, political values and foreign policy. More than three decades later, that distinction has become increasingly unstable. 

Soft Power proposes another possibility: the ability to create the conditions in which people can encounter one another, carry histories across borders, form attachments and imagine themselves differently.

Alongside the exhibition, Sonnenraum will host a 48-hour dancefloor, extending the festival into the realm of nightlife and collective movement. Architects Gonzalez Haase created a spatial concept for the exhibition, the conversations and the music programs to connect with the historical warehouse of Haus der Visionäre. 

A wide-ranging programme of talks will address questions of collective imagination, culture as a political practice, and the relationship between art and night culture. 

Their order follows the detours of Farid ud-Din Attar's ›Conference of the Birds‹, in which a community of birds leaves behind the certainty of what it knows and travels through a series of valleys in search of the Simurgh, the benevolent bird from Persian mythology symbolizing spiritual vastness.

The festival borrows this structure as a logic of passage: not towards a predetermined destination, but through uncertainty, desire, loss, memory, relation and transformation.

Here you can find the detailed programme information for each day:

Festival—Day 1 / Sonnenraum—Day 1 
Festival—Day 2 / Sonnenraum—Day 2 
Festival—Day 3 / Sonnenraum—Day 3