Mirjam Gurtner & Ensemble
In Floret Silva (Forest Flower), choreographer and performer Mirjam Gurtner, together with Mouafak Al Doabl and Yen Lee, explores the fragility of humanity and nature. Set to a deconstructed version of Carmina Burana, with its evocation of Fortuna’s play, the performance brings pleasure, intimacy and community into relation with transience and vulnerability.
For WALDEN Festival, the work is rooted site-specifically in the forest. Within nature’s constant cycles, tremor becomes connected to the possibility of renewal and change.
Adam Goodwin
Adam Goodwin is a Berlin-based composer, double bassist, multi-instrumentalist, multimedia artist and independent researcher. Trained in classical and contemporary double bass performance, his work moves across experimental music, audiovisual practice and visual art. Closely connected to the natural world, Goodwin regularly undertakes tours and excursions in wilderness areas and nature parks, where he composes, improvises, films, records and gathers material. His compositions explore microtonality, resonance, texture and listener perception, often combining graphic notation, text and traditional musical notation. As a performer, he appears as a soloist and with ensembles including ensemble unitedberlin, Zafraan Ensemble, BulCanto Choir, Circuit Training Ensemble and Kollektiv Unruhe.
Laure Gilquin & Ray Kaczynski
In C’est Un Roc, paper is stretched across wooden frames: large frames serve as drawing surfaces, smaller ones become instruments for producing sound. From this simple setting emerges the story of a rock: unshakable, until one day it begins to tremble.
Text, drawing and sound intertwine, opening a space to explore vibrations, cracks and change. Rather than resisting movement, the work invites us to follow it. To let things tremble.
Laure Gilquin, born in Paris in 1981, has been working as an artist in Berlin since 2006. Her practice develops from observations, travels and collaborations, taking shape in photographs, drawings and fragile installations with clay, glass and sound.
Ray Kaczynski, born in Detroit in 1960, has been working as a musician and composer in Berlin since 1994. His work ranges from quiet music to maximalist forms, from pure tones and noises to jazz, world music and groove-based music.
David Kummer & DISCOllective
David Kummer & DISCOllective develop Planthropausescene as a site-responsive, eco-choreographic dance practice that shifts attention from the individual body toward landscape, plant life and the surrounding environment. The practice understands the site itself as a studio and invites pauses, resting, digesting, immersion and dancing as ways of entering a porous relation between body and world. At its core is a choreographic process of becoming: responsive, situated and attentive to what emerges between body, earth, imagination and perception. David Kummer is a Berlin-based dancer, choreographer and shiatsu practitioner whose work explores spatial dance practices. DISCOllective researches, through playful performance, roles, situations and formats between dance, performance, play, choreography, installation and workshop.
Cottbusser Chor & Nicholas Bussmann
Founded in 2014, Cottbusser Chor is a vocal ensemble and performance group whose members speak 13 languages and come from diverse musical backgrounds. This plurality shapes their algorithm-based compositions, in which languages, gestures, accents and inflections become musical material.
In "Arabische Zahlen / Post-National Relaxation Exercise No. 2", the choir asks how we might prepare for a time after the collapse of nation-states: how to learn without fixed frames, how to move beyond borders, and which social skills are needed to inhabit a transitional state between an old order and one not yet formed.
m preis
m preis fka rouge-ah, is a composer, harpist, visual artist, and writer. They are currently researching dreams, nightmares and other sleep disruptions. Their main instruments are acoustic and electric harp, with a tendency of extracting uncharacteristic sounds from them. Since relocating to Berlin in spring 2022, m preis has become a regular at some of the edgiest live music venues in the city, carrying their electric harp and effects pedals everywhere, from smoky underground basements to cosy Neukölln record shops to Berghain Kantine, always bringing fresh and unexpected sounds, from layers of delicate notes to roars of feedback and distortion that seem to conceal an orchestra or a choir in full flow.
Mariechen Danz & Gediminas Žygus
Mariechen Danz and Gediminas Žygus work across voice, sound and installation. Danz's practice explores the body as a site of knowledge and transmission, drawing on oral history and often activating her sculptural environments through spoken and sung performance. Žygus, an artist and composer, creates sonic structures that move between narrative, atmosphere and physical experience. For WALDEN, they will contribute a performative gesture between singing and storytelling — emerging from their ongoing collaboration, the work brings together rhythm and narrative fragments, opening a space in which sound becomes a form of embodied knowledge and shared attention.
Witch ‘n’ Monk
Witch ’n’ Monk is the duo of Colombian flautist Mauricio Velasierra and British soprano and guitarist Heidi Heidelberg. Combining traditional Latin American flutes, unconventional vocals, electric guitar and bespoke electronics, they create a distinctive musical language between composition and improvisation.
Their sound moves across genre boundaries, bringing together radically manipulated flutes, anarchic soprano vocals, analogue electronics and a jazz-punk guitar/bass hybrid. Working with contrasts such as dark and light, punk and romantic, free form and intricate structure, Witch ’n’ Monk are equally at home in jazz, contemporary classical, DIY and underground contexts.
Their latest album OUTFOX was released on FLUID FORM CLUB in 2025. Their 2020 album Witch ’n’ Monk, released on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records, was named Contemporary Album of the Month by The Guardian and received the German Critics’ Award in the crossover category.
Saba Alizadeh
In his new live performance "A Thousand Bodies Live Within Me", Saba Alizadeh reflects on the fractures and tremors of recent years - on wars, uprisings, displacement, and the quiet psychological aftershocks they leave behind. Rooted especially in the realities of Iran, the work does not narrate events directly; instead, their presence moves beneath the surface like an
invisible current. Through manipulated field recordings, archival sounds, processed voices, and the transformed cry of the Kamancheh, Alizadeh weaves together a sonic landscape where personal memory and collective history become inseparable. Some pieces emerge from the sound of the events themselves; others from the emotional residue they left within him. The performance unfolds as a living vibration - a space where trembling becomes movement, silence becomes tension, and distant ruptures continue to echo through the body long after the moment has passed.
Laura Robles & Gustavo Obligado
Tripas is a Berlin-based duo founded by Laura Robles and Gustavo Obligado, bringing together Afro-Peruvian percussion, clarinet, live electronics, and sonic research. Robles expands the Cajón through electronic interventions, loops, and fragmented sound textures, while Obligado creates open sonic spaces with clarinet, effect pedals, drones, and resonances. Emerging from the encounter between Robles’ project Antigroove and Obligado’s improvisational practice, Tripas develops music based on repetitive pulses, drones, and gradual transformations. Improvisation is central: rhythms shift, fall apart, and reorganize, while the boundaries between instrument, environment, noise, and electronics begin to blur.
Otto Oscar Hernandez Ruiz & SHIN Hyo Jin
Since the second edition of WALDEN Festival, Otto Oscar Hernandez Ruiz and SHIN Hyo Jin have accompanied the festival through performative interventions, acting as guides, messengers and shifting figures within its landscape.
Otto Oscar Hernandez Ruiz is a Cuban-born artist and architect whose practice moves between painting, drawing and performance, often exploring the perception and transformation of environments and landscapes. SHIN Hyo Jin is a Berlin-based musician, performer and cultural curator whose work draws on traditional Korean music and performance practices while developing contemporary forms of expression.
Together, they create performative situations that move between sound, gesture, costume and ritualized presence.
mokeyanju
mokeyanju is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, poet, radio host and DJ/vinyl selector whose practice is rooted in rhythm, movement and transnational sonic histories. Influenced by Hip Hop, Fújì, Highlife, Ndombolo, House and percussion-based music, she weaves together records, field recordings and musical traditions from across Africa, the Caribbean and beyond. An avid crate digger since 2016, her collection spans Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Congo, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago and other regions, tracing connections between Highlife, Calypso, Benga, Soukous, Rumba and Electronica. As a regular host of Refuge Worldwide’s Breakfast Show, mokeyanju is known for genre-fluid selections driven by polyrhythmic energy and deep musical research. She has performed internationally, including for Dekmantel Selectors, EGWÚ Records and alongside artists such as The Cavemen with appearances in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and South America.
Hannes
Hannes started DJing as a teenager at Fatplastics – a place that still feels like home to him today. There, he learned early on how different electronic music can sound depending on how you play it. He sees DJing as a kind of conversation between tracks, sounds and moments. This approach results in sets that are constantly changing and sometimes quietly offer new perspectives.
Mina Mohseni
Mina is a current fellow at KHF, presenting a multimedia installation combining video projection, light, reactive sensors, sound and a physical maquette. The work explores the city as a layered space of memory, movement and imagination, shaped by both historical structures and everyday human gestures.
Taking William Blake’s mythical city "Golgonooza" as a point of departure, the project merges live APIs from Isfahan, where the artist previously lived and researched, and Berlin, where they currently reside. From this data, a new imaginary map emerges, interweaving different temporal and spatial layers. The installation considers the city not only as a geographical location, but as an inner and symbolic space: a constantly shifting field shaped by perception, power, use and memory. Rather than presenting the city as a unified identity, "Golgonooza in Isfahan" understands it as a site of conflict, fragmentation, endurance and continually produced possibilities.
Meline Saoirse & Claudia Bachmann
A video installation developed by performer and sound artist Meline Saoirse together with filmmaker and visual artist Claudia Bachmann. Meline has been artist in residence at KHF, Claudia lives and works here since many years. The installation unfolds as a ritual-performance exploring the relationship between body, sound, memory and perception. Through movement, voice, vibration and symbolic actions, the work creates a concentrated space in which physical presence, inner images and sensory experience come into relation. Drawing on dance, somatic practice, sound and ritual forms, it invites viewers into a quiet process of attention, transformation and release.
Eleni Tongidou
Eleni Tongidou’s work moves through material, body, environment, and the systems that pass between them. Working through material, spatial, and research-led processes, the practice works with organic process, spatial memory, and infrastructural force, forming unstable fields where human presence is one rhythm among many. Across microscopic, geological, and more-than-human scales, relations appear as something sensed, carried, and transformed.
In Tremor Body, developed for Walden VI, the voice is released from the body as vibration. Beginning from a reversal of perception, the work attends to the forest as a sensing field. Passing through small sound sources and sculptural forms, the vibration folds human presence into a wider ecology of resonance.
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