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Recap further information and programme overview:
-→Linktree Migrantennale: https://linktr.ee/migrantennale_
-→Programme flyer/detailliertes Programm: Available below in the download area or at the following link https://linktr.ee/migrantennale_
 

MIGRANTENNALE 2025 I  New Arts Festival in NRW 

Migration as Aesthetics Global Interconnections & South-South complicities– an artist-initiated and artist-led residency program and festival for contemporary art shaped by global entanglements
 

Festival: 21–24 August 2025 | Saalbau Witten


Artistic Residency: 4–20 August 2025 | Saalbau Witten

MIGRANTENNALE is an artist-initiated and artist-led residency program and festival for contemporary art. Its first edition took place from 21 to 24 August 2025 at Saalbau Witten. The festival was conceived and curated by Paulina Abufhele, Gabs (Gabriel) Carneiro, and Bianca Mendonça.
Rooted in their own artistic practices, they developed a festival that understands migration not as a theme or identity marker, but as an aesthetic practice: a way of producing art, negotiating knowledge, and reflecting on the present in a globally entangled world. A total of 52 artists took part in the MIGRANTENNALE.
More than 800 visitors attended the multilingual, rich, and thought-provoking program. MIGRANTENNALE reached a new and highly diverse audience and opened up new avenues for Saalbau Witten to engage with contemporary art from global perspectives.

Migration as Aesthetics – the festival’s artistic approach
MIGRANTENNALE is grounded in an aesthetic engagement with multilingualism, the globally entangled present, and with colonial continuities and extractivist logics that continue to shape bodies, spaces, knowledge systems, and the conditions of artistic production today.
The invited works address language and translation as relations of power, the transmission of knowledge across generations, politics of memory, and forms of resistance. Migration appears here not as a biographical label, but as a productive and conflictual force that shapes aesthetic decisions, materials, narrative forms, and working processes.
A particular focus lies on global entanglements and South-South relations that unfold beyond Eurocentric perspectives.

A festival by artists working within globally connected practices
MIGRANTENNALE specifically addressed artists from the so-called Global South who live and work in North Rhine-Westphalia. It sought out artistic positions whose work emerges from experiences of global entanglement and reflects on migration as an aesthetic practice.
The open call deliberately avoided expectations of representation or origin, instead articulating clear thematic and aesthetic concerns: multilingualism, colonial afterlives, extractivism, the circulation of knowledge, and contemporary forms of belonging and memory.

Four days of contemporary art – open and multilingual


From 21 to 24 August 2025, MIGRANTENNALE presented an interdisciplinary and free program at Saalbau Witten, featuring dance, theatre, media art, installation, performance, music, and painting. Many of the formats were participatory and invited the audience to engage actively.
Multilingualism was a central aesthetic principle of the festival. German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi, Mandarin, Ukrainian, Shona, Uyghur, as well as Indigenous languages such as Guaraní, were present simultaneously. Translation emerged situationally and collectively within the space, making communication tangible as an open process.

The MIGRANTENNALE residency program


At the heart of the first edition was the specially developed residency program. From 4 to 20 August 2025, six selected artistic teams worked at Saalbau Witten on new pieces that were presented to the public for the first time during the festival.
The open call met with strong interest: 45 applications were received from more than 25 countries and across more than 20 linguistic and experiential contexts. This highlights both the wide range of professional artistic positions in NRW working from globally connected perspectives and the need for sustainable spaces for production and presentation.

Residency art projects 2025:
* We Who Do Not Belong – dance performance (SoKo Jena)
* Stimmen der Freiheit – multisensory installation (Nadia Karimi, Liu Peimin, Shiva Siyahvashi, Paklia Polat)
* Arete Guasu – Fiesta Grande – multilingual ritual performance (Pampayruna / Rafael Montero)
* República del Excremento – community theatre experience (Samanta Pizarro Aliste, Adam Arhelger, Omar Guadarrama / CIA La Perra Alegría)
* Orange, Red, Yellow – interactive performance (Nooshin Seifi)
* Pachamama – mixed-media performance (Kamalanetra Hung, Felipe González Berrios)

Guest at MIGRANTENNALE: KUNST GRENZENLOS
The festival program was complemented by a cooperation with Malteser Werke and the large travelling exhibition KUNST GRENZENLOS, on view in the foyer of Saalbau Witten from 21 to 27 August 2025. Curated by Sinan Yaman.

Further collaborations: URBANE KÜNSTE RUHR presented GRAND SNAIL TOUR, a key work: a migrant and collective cartography of the Ruhr region that proposes an expanded reading of the territory based on trajectories, displacements, and shared memories.
DESVIOS SÜD designed the interactive space ARQUIVO as an open workshop. Its point of departure was a large-scale affective collective textile with handwritten entries. At various workstations, visitors could intervene in a black-and-white photo archive by photographer Emelyn Yábar in postcard format using threads, needles, and other materials, rearrange the images in space, and develop new visual constellations.

Partners and funders
MIGRANTENNALE 2025 was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Diversitätsfonds NRW), the City of Witten, Stadtwerke Witten, Sparkasse Witten, and Kulturforum Witten.