PACT Zollverein’s yearly international symposium IMPACT, initiated in 2004, brings together around 35 artists, practitioners, theoreticians and advanced students in the fields of dance, theatre, performance, visual arts, new media and film, for a three day exchange engaging critically with the artistic strategies and working methods of three exceptional guest artists. Each day's internal agenda is devised and led by one of the guest artists and informed by all the participants. In the evenings, the general public is also warmly invited to engage with these artists’ work during impact’s public strand of activities.

For the 9th edition of impact we look forward to an intense encounter with Walid Raad (LB/US), Kris Verdonck (BE) and Vlatka Horvat (HR/US/UK) who, with their jarring and playful works, put the way we see, experience and evaluate to the test. Whether working with subtle participative elements, time-delays or multi-layered framing devices, they constantly and knowingly create opportunities to get lost in translations. Walid Raad’s photographs, installations and documentary texts confront the observer with questions about truth, construction and understanding of history; Kris Verdonck, in his installations and performances anchored somewhere between dance and architecture, debates the relationship between man and machine in today’s high-tech world; and Vlatka Horvat queries the everyday application of things with help from simple aggravations in her poetic sculptures and performances, and so provokes universal thoughts about the world and existence itself.