The Beyond Gravity Festival is a biennial, interdisciplinary festival for digital arts, dance and performance, which will enter its second edition in 2025. It is organised in cooperation between the Theater im Depot, the Academy for Theatre and Digitality and the Kulturforum Witten.

Beyond Gravity
01. - 05. October 2025

Following its successful launch in 2023, the festival will expand its content profile, regional reach and international focus in 2025. It will take place from 1 to 5 October 2025 and mark the opening of the season at the Theater im Depot.

The festival centres on the thematic programme

Decolonizing the Digital

which deals with the intertwining of digital technology, global power relations and artistic practice.

Decolonising the digital means that we want to take a close look at where and how digital technologies cement or even reinforce power inequalities. The aim is to make these inequalities visible, to talk about them – and to devise artistic ways of changing them or counteracting them.

To this end, between June and October 2025, we invited three curators and artists – teams from the so-called Global South – to collaborate with regional developers to create new works, which will also premiere during the festival.

These projects explore new connections between different types of knowledge and technologies – knowledge from different cultures and with different perspectives. A central question is:

How can we design technologies in such a way that they incorporate many perspectives and world views?

The three residency groups are:

Viviane Maghela (CMR), Eric Takukam (CMR) & Enya Obert (D)

Laura Cugusi (I), machine yearning / Nada Zanhour (LBN) & Federico Zurani (I)

PANGEA IA: Maria Luisa Angulo (SLV/F) & Marlon Barrios Solano (VEN/USA)

The curatorial approach deliberately reverses established invitation policies: artists from the Global South are not invited, but actively shape the conditions for artistic cooperation with the Global North.

Complementing the residency programme is the two-day symposium Beyond Gravity Reflexions, which discursively examines the topics of digitality, decolonisation and artistic research. Keynotes, lecture performances, project presentations and moderated discussions will bring together different international perspectives in dialogue. The aim is to open up a pluriversal space for thinking and possibilities for future-oriented digital cultures.

In addition to the residency and discourse programme, the festival will feature a curated programme of guest performances and world premieres with productions from the Ruhr region, Germany and other European countries. In terms of content, this section focuses on two major thematic areas: the use of artificial intelligence in artistic production processes and the development of hybrid performance situations between digital and physical spaces, bodies and narratives.

With works by:

Angie Abdilla (AUS)
Kiraṇ Kumār (IND)
Oleomingus (IND)
Norbert Pape (F/D) & Simon Speiser (ECU/D)
Die Ruhrgebieterinnen (D)
Laura Waltz (F/D)
MIRA - Julia Riera (D)

The Beyond Gravity Festival 2025 brings together artistic research, digital innovation and global socio-political issues. It combines regional cultural work with international networking and offers platforms for transcultural cooperation, critical reflection and artistic-technological visions of the future.

Programme & Tickets

Click here for the programme overview and here for ticket sales on rausgegangen (also available on the individual subpages for the shows, listed at the bottom of this page).

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