Mutational fields of encounter and the activation of relation 

A transgressive memory culture emerges from contemporary cultural, artistic and digital practices that reject closure, linearity, and singular authorship. It reclaims the representation of the past not in its monumental form, but as mutational field of encounter, where memory is allowed to become speculative or embodied, and where the constraints of linear pasts without agency are disbanded. 

Drawing on grammars of the digital, its glitches, loops, and new forms of archiving and networks, artists and cultural practitioners are reconfiguring the aesthetics of remembrance. Their works mobilise image, code, and sound as insurgent languages that break open linear temporalities and establish spaces of multiplicity as well as ever ghostly returns. 

Here, commemoration is no longer about the preservation of fact, but about the activation of relation between bodies and databases, absence and algorithms, personal encounter and public witness as well as the collective and the individual. 

These activations stretch beyond and between the past, present and future and/or geographical boundaries, calling for reflection on the situatedness of memory culture.  

Our festival proposes transgressive memory as both method and principle.  

We regard transgressive memory as a mode of remembrance that questions not only institutional authority and dissolves the border between documentary and fiction, but also acknowledges the complicity of technology in shaping collective consciousness. Without a mediatising transmitter, there is no memory. 

Established forms and formats of commemoration, i.e. monuments, anniversaries, commemoration days, or classic exhibitions, continue to uphold traditions of historical awareness. Yet these frameworks often show limitations: in what they are able to reflect and who they speak of and to. They often merely reach audiences already convinced of their value or political signal, while particularly digital generations experience the past through digital images, data, and networks. 

Transgressive memory culture responds to this disparity and acknowledges that contemporary art and digital aesthetics are able to translate historical knowledge into emotionally accessible, participatory, and globally connected forms, transgressing our rehearsed notion of temporality. The festival seeks to renew the public relevance of remembrance by moving from preservation to activation, (re-)calling for an understanding of history as a shared civic practice.  

Rather than replacing established historiography, transgressive memory culture complements it. It translates complex, personal and hidden historical knowledge into experiential forms, which speak to audiences across generations and backgrounds. By collaborating with artists, historians, and technologists, transgressive memory culture aims to reinvigorate the social function of remembrance to make it participatory, polyphonic, and responsive to the challenges of our (digital) present. 

The festival consists of four modules: exhibition, performances, film screenings and a discourse programme. These modules will be complemented by a music programme in cooperation with CTM Festival and a special exhibit by transmediale. 

Transmitting 

In the 21st century, memory has become both cultural obsession, as described in Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, and contested terrain. As images, data, and histories circulate across digital networks, the very foundations of remembrance, its media, its perceived authenticity, and its political agency, are shifting. With our exhibition, Transgressive Memory Festival explores how contemporary media art not only reconfigures collective memory, but also intervenes in power structures shaping memory cultures. Utilising video installations, immersive technologies, digital archives, and gaming environments, the participating artists transform remembrance into an act that resists closure and reclaims agency. 

Rewiring 

Our performance programme gathers around a shared urgency: to listen to the past not as something completed, but as something vibrating through the body, machines, and the collective nervous system. In performative spaces, memory becomes an unstable interface asking: what forms of belonging might emerge once the archives of (new and old) empires and discarded stories are rewired through sound, data, and embodied knowledge? History is not a sequence of past events, but a narrative act constructed by embodied human experience. Sharing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observation that “the body is our general medium for having a world”, we ask how world-making is transmitted to the representation and investigation of our past(s) in a body that is in constant transformation through new technologies. 

Unlearning 

If remembrance is a social practice that is created under specific conditions, these conditions can also be unlearned. Every culture of remembrance is built upon conventions that determine whose histories are preserved, which forms of evidence are recognised, and who is granted the authority to narrate the past. Our discourse programme approaches unlearning not as an act of forgetting, but as a critical practice that exposes inherited frameworks of our memory culture and opens them to revision. Bringing together artists, historians, activists, and cultural practitioners, it explores how absent histories return through new practices of visibility, how political power shapes the boundaries of public memory, and how artistic research unsettles established distinctions between evidence, speculation, and truth. Unlearning becomes a way of recognising remembrance itself as a cultural technique: one that is constantly negotiated, continually rewritten, and capable of imagining histories otherwise.