FIBER Festival 2026
FESTIVAL THEME:
Fragile Forces
Fragile Forces directly responds to the widespread fusing of hard power, colonial and imperial violence, genocide, the growing links between militarisation and culture, ecological extraction and weaponisation of AI and information networks. What are meaningful responses, and how can we find common ground on this? Can art help us with this? Are there resilience skills that we can share with one another?
This 2026 theme will act as a guiding principle to counterbalance the current extractive and military zeitgeist, technofeudalism, climate collapse and accelerating global shifts. It gives us a moment to reflect on what may be lost forever, and what to do with this realisation? At a time when it is extraordinarily challenging to imagine a bright future, or to reflect on what a post-apocalyptic reality might hold, recognising the forces of interdependence and mutual support appears to be an essential way to adapt.
Inspired by the work of writer and scholar Dean Spade, the festival will try to link its theme to the concept of mutual aid and radical vulnerability. In the words of Spade: “As governments fail to respond to – or actively engineer – each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.”
The discourse programme explores strategies, directions and forces that, based on fragility, love, care and gentleness, are creative forces and contribute to feelings of empowerment (which may prompt individual and collective action). Through a wider selection of performances, works and conversations we’ll experience various artistic reflections on fragility, alternative directions for chance or ways to push back. Here, we examine planetary-wide issues and urgent developments in art and culture.
The concept of fragility contains an interesting tension: it is something that can be easily damaged, can crack or shatter into pieces. It is a state of tension, which, once broken, may be impossible to return to. It urges us to treat something with care, in the knowledge that what lies behind it may be difficult to restore or may never return. At the same time, it can be synonymously used for something that possesses material, cultural and ecological beauty and vitality, but is unable to protect itself effectively against brute force.
For the 2026 festival, FIBER will explore the theme Fragile Forces as a source of collective strength. Not to see fragility as weakness, but to highlight that tension, sensitivity and softness are a powerful, alluring force. With this in mind, we ask: what does it mean to listen, perform, and play in relation to fragility? What kinds of forces can instil resilience, when something seems beyond repair? Following last year’s theme Wildness, which co-adapted the acceleration and the need for artistic and social rewilding, this edition invites visitors to catch their breath, slow down, regroup and focus on forms of vulnerable resistance.
Encouraging ecological thinking and collective listening, we’ll examine how seemingly invisible, inaudible, and minimal forces and micro-shifts in materials, sounds, ecosystems and more-than-human networks can converge to create something vast and beyond human control. How can we draw strength from attuning and empathising with the invisible agency that lies beyond our own human sensory perception? Artists, from media artists to performing musicians, have always been interested in exploring the vastness of time and powerful fragility of more-than human life. From the geological pace of glaciers and life in the deep sea to the creation of fictional worlds brimming with sonic and audiovisual polyphony.
FIBER hopes that our festival, like many others, can be a moment to come together and explore the fragile forces of art and music as spaces of attunement, listening, dancing together, mutual attention, and how we can find modes of potential resistance.
