Recap ›Shifting Grounds – IN COMMON‹

On the final day of the festival ›Shifting Grounds – IN COMMON‹, the focus was on voices, community, and resonance. From the early afternoon onwards, Cute Community Radio transformed the PACT terrace into a Cute Community Hangout, with DJ sets by Jilly, Jule, ADJO, and Bamina.

Parallel to this, talks and workshops took place inside. To kick off the programme, Noah Slee invited participants to take part in a collective singing workshop. The Kukily Afrofeminist Arts Collective invited participants to experience cassava as a method for exchanging languages, recipes, memories, ancestral practices, and forms of resistance. Through ›Mandioca – an afrodiasporic journey‹ a space emerges dedicated to the practices of planting, cultivating, preparing, and consuming cassava, highlighting its role as a vessel of history, community, and cultural heritage.

With ›Collective Action Now!‹, Amanda Piña explored the possibilities for transformation within our bodies, both singular and collective. In response to the challenges of the climate crisis, the talk and workshop was a call for strengthening our capacity for collective action and imagining livable futures together.

The festival ended in the evening with a large closing concert by the Berlin-based BIPOC vocal ensemble A Song For You on the PACT terrace. Blending choir, movement, improvisation, poetry, and live instrumentation, the ensemble’s performance ›In Circulation‹ explored themes of recurrence and the cyclical nature of being.