Conflux Festival 2026 Programme Is Complete

Rotterdam based awyn1000 mixing under the reddit born (user)name. Lover of vast landscapes and sad stories, into folk (naturally). Decidedly undecided on genre, depends on how words are hitting that day. Ain't much but it's honest work (a win).

During the day, specifically from 14:00 to 18:00, there will be a walk-in workshop by (un)repair café.

Do you dig through trash only to find treasure? Are you interested in building servers? Do you take the shop out of Photoshop? Is a printer jam your kind of jam?

Have something specific you want to repair? Reach out via the link below

A key innovator in the 1990s Hardtec and Tribe scenes, 69db has been pushing the boundaries of live improvised sets since 1991. As a founding member of Spiral Tribe and R-Zac, he played a pivotal role in shaping the underground rave culture and co-founded Network 23 Recordings, a label that defined the sound of the free party movement in the 1990s. Today, Network 23 continues to inspire a new generation of hard techno producers.

The renewed interest in 90s hard techno has been reflected in record sales. In 2023 alone, 69db released four EPs on Berlin’s Sound Metaphors and a double EP, along with a five-record box set, on Rotterdam’s PRSPCT label — all of which sold out. Responding to this demand, he and his R-Zac partner, Crystal Distortion, launched the “23 Records or Bust!” series, reissuing 23 records from their 90s catalog. The first nine releases sold out in under a year, proving the timeless appeal of their work.

In early 2024, 69db debuted Rooted Sky under his new project, Wave Arising, in collaboration with movement specialist Kynsie Serre. This project blends ambient, tribal, experimental, and hard techno, further expanding his live improvisational approach. The Wave Arising Liveset by 69db, praised for its fusion of hard tribal techno with dub techniques, has already garnered critical acclaim, with Resident Advisor naming it one of the standout performances at Dekmantel 2024. 69db remains a force in electronic music, continuing to evolve his sound and inspire audiences worldwide.

Alex Zhang Hungtai is a multidisciplinary artist focused on improvisation and its correlation with the unconscious. After retiring his project Dirty Beaches, Zhang has focused on explorations of improvised music, free jazz, and his role as a composer. His more recent compositions predominantly work with saxophone and drums while also delving into electronic music.

Besides his solo work, his past collaborators include Tashi Dorji, Che Chen, Chris Williams, Sam Shalabi, David Maranha, and Gabriel Ferrandini. Zhang currently works as a composer for film soundtracks, alongside acting in independent films.

He appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return alongside Dean Hurley and Riley Lynch under the fictitious band name Trouble. His latest film score, Godland by Hlynur Pálmason, was featured in the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Factory Segment I is based on the conveyor-belt systems used in the food-processing industry. The installation consists of a sequence of interconnected bodies, each carrying the same load and bearing responsibility for its own link in the chain. As in his wider practice, De Zoete creates these figures by copying his own body, transforming a personal form into a repeated industrial component.

The arrangement remains deliberately ambiguous: are the bodies being forced together, or are they embracing one another? They appear as part of a factory in which the human body becomes both carrier and product. Through repetition, the individual gradually disappears into a mechanical system of collective labour, dependency, and production.

This work is commissioned by Conflux Festival.

Animistic Beliefs are one of the most distinctive projects to emerge from Rotterdam’s electronic underground. Formed by Mara Lalihatu and Linh Luu, the queer Southeast Asian duo move through DJing, punk-charged hardware live sets, introspective records and theatrical work with a sound shaped by club music, diasporic memory and a taste for the unexpected. Few acts move as comfortably between clubs, museums and theatre stages as this radical Rotterdam pair.

Their DJ sets carry that open-ended musical identity into the club. As selectors, Animistic Beliefs move through global club sounds, breakbeats, UK bass, jersey club, footwork and bass-heavy electronics with curiosity and instinct. Their sets are playful, queer, sensual, high-energy and strange, guided less by genre purity than by a desire to move through the full range of human experience.

This versatility has taken Animistic Beliefs far beyond Rotterdam. Their live and DJ sets have connected with audiences physically and emotionally across Europe, East Asia and the Americas, with appearances at Rewire, Berlin Atonal, CTM, Dekmantel, MUTEK and Nuits Sonores. Their work has been covered by Resident Advisor, DJ Mag, Mixmag, Glamcult and VICE, with RA naming them a must-watch live act in its Breaking Through series; in the Netherlands, MERDEKA won the 3voor12 Award for Best Dutch Album.

Under Construction (Tactics for Cultural Resistance) explores the possibility of a female perspective on political power and hierarchy as a counterforce to male-dominated systems of power. At the centre of the installation are four monumental ceramic busts of women, positioned high upon pedestals. They resemble classical ideals of beauty: pale in colour, with smooth faces, long flowing hair, and wreaths of flowers upon their heads.

Wenzel has carved texts deep into their faces, leaving them behind like scars. These short slogans, including Fuck the Dictator and I Am My Own Prophet, draw on language used during feminist protests and by movements such as Femen and the Women’s Marches.

Especially for and in collaboration with Conflux Festival, Wenzel developed a series of projections using found footage of feminist protests and demonstrations. Projected through shattered car windows, the images appropriate the forceful visual language of street protest and evoke the overthrow of an established order in favour of a new one: a many-voiced community calling for democracy, freedom, self-determination, and sovereignty.

This work is commissioned by Conflux Festival.

Besides presenting her new work, Under Construction (Tactics for Cultural Resistance), Anne Wenzel will take part in the Conflux conference, where she will delve deeper into the concepts behind the work and her wider sculptural practice.

Anne Wenzel works on a strong and distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations that are often placed in an accurately orchestrated setting. Wenzel takes a more subversive position between tradition and modernity. Departing from historical iconography, she tackles contemporary and often political themes by using a consciously chosen traditional medium: clay.

Out of a fascination for the language of heroism, she questions the manipulative force of nationalist architecture and sculpture. Investigating their formal language and history, Wenzel reinterprets the symbolic value by connecting it to current tendencies in political culture.

Ash is a visual artist and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand. She listens for the voice as a hinge between the physical material of the body, and the unreliable social fabric of language.

Bambí Benkö is a Dutch-Hungarian artist, educator and dream worker with a focus on participatory performance and political intervention. In 2012, they founded Tools for Action, an art and activist collective that develops disobedient pedagogies and open-source tools for assembly and political action. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism and queer visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity and collective imagination.

Bambí Benkö will take part in the panel 'What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?' A conversation on grief, empathy and spirituality in social justice activism between Camille Sapara Barton and Jerry Afriyie, moderated by Bambí Benkö.

Find more information this conversation and about Tools for Action below.

Photo by Dani Hefter.

Shifting Perspectives operates as an autonomous storytelling device, realized through a custom-built environment using TouchDesigner, local LLMs, and a diffusion-based image engine running on a high- powered PC. Over the course of each iteration, the system dynamically weaves together video and laser projections in a looping, procedurally generated sequence. Visitors experience an unfolding journey of perspectives and associations but remain observers, without the ability to influence, interrupt, or alter the machine’s direction. Instead, they are encouraged to engage with and understand the work, iteration by iteration.

This project is presented within the context of the Creative Industries Fund NL’s Talent Development Grant Scheme. The realisation of the work and its presentation are made possible through the Creative Industries Fund NL’s support.

bela (they/them) is a South Korean musician and performance artist based between Berlin and Prague. bela uses guttural vocals and feedback to build texture and resonance. Conceptually, their work often adopts an autobiographical voice that courses through lived experiences, lineage, and transcendance. In this regard, their music and performance ask to renew or expand the sense of locating around sounds and bodies within the social and celestial sphere.

bela presents an audiovisual performance with Anton Filatov, based on his recent album "Korean Love Sonnets". The work is an intense and direct exploration of the acoustics of the guttural voice in relation to other bodies and spaces. bela discovers romance in its most tactile form, leaning into creaks, feedback, and resonance to create a sombre yet intimate hour, suspended by inhuman notes above the material plane.

bela was awarded honorable mention at ZKM’s GigaHertz Prize PopExperimental awards in 2023 for their work on the album Noise and Cries. They participated in the SHAPE+ Platform in 23’-24’, and are a laureate of La Becque residency in 2026. Their solo and collaborative live performances have been featured at Berlin Atonal; Nowadays, NYC; Schauspielhaus Zürich; Cafe OTO, London; CTM Festival, Berlin; and Unsound Kraków.

Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, embodiment social designer, advisor and DJ who creates resources or collective experiences that prototype embodied decolonisation and reconnection to the web of life. Camille’s work is grounded in Black Feminism, ecology, somatics and harm reduction. They are the author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024).

Camille Sapara Barton will take part in the panel 'What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?' A A conversation on grief, empathy and spirituality in social justice activism between Camille Sapara Barton and Jerry Afriyie, moderated by Bambí Benkö.

Find more information about this conversation below.

Collectief Wasem is a collective founded by Elin Mensinga and Puck Wacki. With their shared interest in sound, the need for a stage for young sound makers emerged during their studies. By hosting performance nights, workshops, and now radio shows, they seek to get people actively listening to the versatility of sound and experimental music.

Concepción Huerta is a multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in audiovisual media and a deep focus on sound. Her practice spans sound design, video installations, spatialized concerts, speculative narratives, and immersive experiences.

Her approach to sound begins with an exploration of the relationship between silence and noise, political space, and sound as a means of enunciation. She investigates resonance, acoustic space, and the physical and psychological impact of sound in relation to the listener.

Her sonic explorations are rooted in recordings of everyday objects and instruments such as synthesizers, which she manipulates through tape recorders and processed tapes to create atmospheres influenced by ambient and noise. Rather than fitting within a specific musical genre, her sound works construct imagined narratives and immersive sonic worlds.

Based in Rotterdam, DJ Easy B is closely linked to the Renegade ZMK Soundsystem and Move Around Sound. His sets combine breaks, UK bass, and techno into high-energy dancefloor fillers, always infused with a dose of subversive spirit. Following his acclaimed trilogy on the Double Cross XX label, he has just released his latest EP, Vendetta.

Iris (Droom) is known for her dreamlike visuals in graphic design, and her love for 80's sci-fi. She explores a spectrum of analog synth sounds and nostalgia. Her selections mainly consist of italo-disco, electro and beyond.

Chris Tam Nelck (DD) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, performance, and text. With a background in fine arts and a keen eye for visual composition. Chris has a long lived love for the performative side of the 80s: experimental gender expressions, new wave and heavy synths.

Together, Droom & DD blend Italo-disco, retro-futurism, warm synths with hints of electro and acid.

Eric Parren (NL/US) is an interdisciplinary artist operating out of Helsinki. His practice includes the combined use of new and traditional digital and analog media, through which he investigates our understanding of the ideas and technologies that shape the future. Eric's works are often visceral, sensory experiences exploring modes of perception and the physics of light and sound. Informed by a deep knowledge of the histories of media arts, electronic music composition, and expanded cinema, his work makes links between the past, the present, and what is to come.

Eric is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University in the Department of Art and Media where he conducts research on artificial life, embodied cognition, and mechatronics. Previously he taught courses on programming and electronics for artists, realtime audiovisual systems, kinetic / light / sound art at NYU Shanghai, ArtCenter College of Design, and UCLA. He is a founding member of the art collective Macular and runs the experimental music show La Force Sauvage.

Eric studied at the Interfaculty ArtScience of the Royal Academy of Art and Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he received his BFA in 2009. He went on to study at the Design Media Arts department of the University of California Los Angeles, where he was awarded his MFA in 2012. His works have been shown at galleries and festivals across Europe, North America, and Asia.

As a multi-colour laser beam enters a soap bubble (the chemical ancestor of a living cell’s lipid membrane), it splits into microscopic optical branches. Unlike other light sources, the laser's coherent emission gets trapped inside a bubble’s skin, carving out filamentous pathways along which the light propagates unperturbed. During the performance, these laser branches meander through clusters of hemispherical bubbles, which serve as molecule-thin lenses for a 360° laser projection. The projection envelopes the audience in an unfathomable magnification of the electrochemical and optofluidic dynamics within the sensitive skin of a bubble.

The Killing of Sammy Baker
Forensic Architecture and Forensis, 2023
Published with VPRO-Human

On 13 August 2020, Sammy Baker was shot to death by police during an episode of mental health crisis which left him separated from his friends and family and lost in an Amsterdam suburb.

Forensic Architecture (FA) and Forensis, in collaboration with Argos/VPRO-Human, reveals how Sammy’s death was the result of a series of failures by the officers involved, resulting in the escalation of a mental health crisis into a tragic fatal shooting.


FA and Forensis were invited by Sammy’s parents to examine the account of their son’s death given by the Dutch state, in light of the available evidence. The agencies reconstructed Sammy’s body position at the time he was shot, combining data from videos, pathology reports, and eyewitness testimonies. Together, these reconstructions allowed for a closer interrogation of the incident than ever before, as well as an examination of the officers’ claims, and of the state’s own investigation into the incident.

The investigation, published as an interactive ‘scrollyteller’ on VPRO’s pages reveals inconsistencies in police accounts of the shooting, and raises significant questions about the investigation conducted by the Dutch public prosecutor.

Credits

Project Coordinators
Robert Trafford
Lola Conte

Research
Natalia Sliwinska
Peter Polack
Phoebe Walton

Project Support
Joris Heijkant
Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Earshot)

Collaborators
Argos (VPRO-Human)

The Killing of Ibrahima Barry (25min)
Forensis, 2026

Ibrahima Barry died on 6 January 2024 following a police operation in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. Ibrahima was subjected to excessive and prolonged restraint by officers who were responding to reports of a disturbance at the refugee accommodation facility in which he lived at the time.

Commissioned by the lawyers for Ibrahima’s family, Forensis analysed video material from two bodycams worn by officers involved in the incident. Using video analysis and 3D modelling, and incorporating information from the case file, Forensis reconstructed the events leading up to Ibrahima’s death.

The research reveals the extent of the violent restraint used by the police officers, and concludes that the actions of the officers at the scene contributed directly to Ibrahima’s death. Forensis’ film incorporates the analysis of a world-renowned professor of forensic medicine, Dr Michael Freeman, who concluded on the basis of the digital reconstruction and video analysis that ‘you have to call this death a homicide’.

The investigation was submitted as evidence to the trial of nine officers in Duisburg on 27 August 2026. On 2 September the court rejected the application to include Forensis’ findings, and declined to invite a representative of Forensis to present our findings and methodologies to the court.

Credits

Project Coordinators
Phoebe Walton
Robert Trafford

Research
Natasha Pereverzina
Azul De Monte
Phoebe Walton
Luis Matienzo Reimold

Video Editor
Sina Salimi

Project Support
Joy Hwang

For Conflux Festival, Foundscape Orchestra presents a thirty-minute performance at Brutus Rotterdam. Daniel Maalman performs together with Foundscape artists Jaap Mutter and Jasper Schütz, joined by guest musician Farzané, who previously collaborated with Foundscape Orchestra on an earlier site-specific edition of the project. A selection of instruments from the Foundscape Orchestra arsenal is combined with Farzané’s sonic textures. Large and small pneumatic percussion instruments, sound sculptures driven by compressed air, vibration motors and organ pipes form a spatial composition that is partly amplified and partly acoustic, intertwining mechanical rhythms, vibrations and air with Farzané’s sonic world.

A highlight of Friday programme at the hub will be a panel talk about rave culture and free parties with 69db and Siuli K.O., who will both play at the Export Club night later in the evening. The talk will be moderated by Eric Parren.

A key innovator in the 1990s Hardtec and Tribe scenes, 69db has been pushing the boundaries of live improvised sets since 1991. As a founding member of Spiral Tribe and R-Zac, he played a pivotal role in shaping the underground rave culture and co-founded Network 23 Recordings, a label that defined the sound of the free party movement in the 1990s. Today, Network 23 continues to inspire a new generation of hard techno producers.

Siuli K.O. is always on the hunt for fresh, forward-thinking sounds in bass and leftfield beats. In the 90s, she was at the foundation of the notorious Acid Planet and Industrial Funk parties, and of experimental labels Grijs and Nocturnal State, deep within The Hague's OG underground scene, connected to Unit Moebius, Curley Esoteric, and Spiral Tribe's Network 23.

Metal Slag Twins is a selected piece from the project What’s Left Speaks by Felix Bell, Nuno Lobo, and Gaia D’Arrigo. The project was commissioned by das Leben am Haverkamp and developed through Rewire Festival, with support from the Stimuleringsfonds and the Municipality of The Hague. What’s Left Speaks is an immersive installation in which speakers are imagined as chimeric creatures emerging from a post-human environment. The installation creates a speculative scenario that invites visitors to discover how these creatures exist and communicate through vocal fragments, rhythmic pulses, and whispers. Metal Slag Twins is made from archaeological industrial remains: ceramic horns glazed with metal slag gathered from Rotterdam’s harbour.

This project is presented within the context of the Creative Industries Fund NL’s Talent Development Grant Scheme. The realisation of the work and its presentation are made possible through the Creative Industries Fund NL’s support.

Behind the decks Genyten brings her broad range of tastes honed by years of working behind the scenes in festivals, clubs and record labels. From downtempo and wave oddballs to sub-heavy stuff and more club-ready sounds, she’s happiest when unexpected combinations come together and the music gets minds as engaged as much as the feet.

Gonçalo Almeida’s double bass solo performance is a research and development of the musical ideas explored in his album Ciclos, focusing on sound, repetition, and texture. In this solo setting, Almeida explores the full sonic range of the double bass, combining acoustic playing with a subtle use of amplification and light.

The performance focuses on lengthy structures and the slow development of musical concepts, reflecting on the nature of time, structure, and control. It uses the raw sound of the double bass and its ability to produce a wide range of textures, from quiet harmonics and resonances to deep drones and sharp percussive attacks. Through repetition and subtle shifts in timbre and dynamics, Almeida explores how small changes in sound can gradually transform the perception of the instrument and the space around it.

The result is an immersive yet grounded performance, centred on the physical presence of the double bass and its capacity to fill, shape, and transform a space.

Halte Charlois is an ongoing socio-cultural fashion project by fashion designer Nada van Dalen, created for and by the Charlois neighbourhood in Rotterdam. The aim of Halte Charlois is, in essence, simple: to capture Charlois as it is now, before it disappears beyond recognition in the tide of history.

Through ‘Halte Charlois’, Nada van Dalen aims to bring the people of Charlois together and strengthen their sense of community. A project that benefits the neighbourhood, the wider area and the people of Charlois. Capturing and documenting a Charlois identity that spans all generations. An identity that unites the people of Charlois with their streets, parks, shops and homes; that brings together the colourful characters and the local youth.

This talk will be moderated by Cecile van Bruggen.

Smuggling Bodies: Digital Embodiment as a Method for Reimagining Body Politics

Smuggling Bodies explores how virtual platforms determine what counts as a “valid” body. Most avatar systems are built around standardized, human-centred assumptions about how bodies are expected to look and behave. Bodies that fall outside these predefined norms become illegible to the system and are rejected rather than recognized as other possible forms of embodiment. In response, Chan examines the rules and boundaries of these systems, looking for ways to bend and renegotiate them in order to smuggle rejected bodies back in.

By deliberately misusing the rules embedded within virtual systems, Smuggling Bodies asks whether digital embodiment can become a method for questioning existing body politics and producing forms of bodily knowledge beyond the norms reproduced by these systems.

This project is presented within the context of the Creative Industries Fund NL’s Talent Development Grant Scheme. The realisation of the work and its presentation are made possible through the Creative Industries Fund NL’s support.

Since the late nineteenth century, Mars has been trapped within our biased imagination, from myths about canals to fantasies of conquest in science fiction. Becoming Red Dust rethinks this legacy, inviting us to look beyond data models. Modern technology has corrected many illusions, yet our knowledge still depends on data and AI simulations. Reducing a planet to numbers risks creating distance rather than encouraging connection.

Through a combination of psychic channelling, planetary science, and collective imagination workshops, Becoming Red Dust brings spiritual and scientific approaches to Mars together in a body of sensory sculptures. It invites us to shift our perspective towards Mars’s tiniest inhabitant: its red dust. This speculative approach offers a more intimate understanding of the planet and proposes a future of coexistence, in which even non-living beings can become storytellers and witnesses within a shared ecology. In this way, Mars becomes less a target to conquer and more a world to relate to.

This project is presented within the context of the Creative Industries Fund NL’s Talent Development Grant Scheme. The realisation of the work and its presentation are made possible through the Creative Industries Fund NL’s support.

The pursuit of efficiency once led to human shopkeepers being replaced by vending machines. Today, laboratories at the forefront of organoid intelligence research are cultivating human neural tissue as a computing substrate, aiming to surpass the efficiency of silicon. Vending Machine Organoid puts this research to work inside an everyday vending machine, replacing its processor with human brain organoids. Normally, the exchange is simple: insert a coin, enter a code, and receive a product. Here, coins and key presses stimulate living neural tissue, whose activity holds your credit and determines what is selected. To receive a product, you must adapt to its fatigue, fluctuations, and rhythms. Inside this machine, human brain cells work for coins.

Developed in collaboration with FinalSpark, co-produced by V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media as part of
the Microdosing A.I. art and technology residencies.

This project is presented within the context of the Creative Industries Fund NL’s Talent Development Grant Scheme. The realisation of the work and its presentation are made possible through the Creative Industries Fund NL’s support.

Jerry Afriyie is a poet and the co-founder of Nederland Wordt Beter Foundation where he provides guest lectures on anti-Black racism and awareness-raising projects about the colonial and slavery past of the Netherlands. The foundation is committed to increasing knowledge about the impact of this history and providing educational materials to schools.

Mr. Afriyie coordinated the production and publication of a free-to-download curriculum on the history of colonialism and slavery to be used in classrooms throughout the Netherlands, from primary schools to universities. Companies, schools, and municipalities in the Netherlands call upon the organization’s expertise to combat everyday racism, social exclusion, and inequality. Nederland Wordt Beter was one of the main organizers of the Black Lives Matter protests in the Netherlands in 2020. Through the efforts of Jerry Afriyie, Nederland Wordt Beter and other anti-racist organizations, the government has acknowledged that institutional racism exists in the Netherlands. On December 19, 2022, the Dutch Prime Minister apologized for the Dutch Slavery past and on July 1, 2023, the Dutch King apologized for the Netherlands' historical involvement in slavery and the effects that it still has today.

Jerry Afriyie will take part in the panel 'What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?' A conversation on grief, empathy and spirituality in social justice activism between Camille Sapara Barton and Jerry Afriyie, moderated by Bambí Benkö.

Inhabiting the Skin is a world-building workshop in which participants explore personal transformation through the metaphor of the skin. Designed by Johannes Equizi and Eva Oosterlaken (Studio Futurall), the workshop blends theories of futuring, architecture, and queerness with the somatic experiences of making, role-playing, and movement. These elements are combined to explore how bodies, identities, and spaces shape one another in response to oppressive systems and inner desires.

The exhibition consists of two parts. The first is a spatial installation made of latex, aluminium, and lead pieces. These are the skins crafted by the participants and the spatial props that form a membrane: the parallel time-space in which each participant role-played a new version of themselves. The second is a research section that reveals the workshop’s theoretical background, prototypes, and documentation.

Inhabiting the Skin is part of Rehearsing Common Utopias, a research project by Johannes Equizi that explores the intersection of architecture, role-playing, and futuring through a series of collaborative workshops.

photo by Lucy Schreurs

From control to coexistence. For thirty years, I watched the Strzyża stream disappear beneath my hometown of Gdańsk. Highways and shopping malls replaced riparian forests. The stream was forced into an underground pipe. When this water infrastructure fails due to advancing climate change, local residents respond with collective ingenuity. They build sandbag dams to keep the water away. Imaginative, embodied knowledge emerges where large-scale protective systems break down.

Choreographing Resilience introduces new, improvised, and inventive DIY acts of preparedness. The proposed resilience emerges from many small actions rather than one large plan. In Rituelen van Henriëttewaard, strategic dike ruptures allow the River Maas and its fertile sediments to reclaim space, while communities develop DIY harvesting and bio-based building rituals to rehearse living with seasonal flooding. Living with Impermanence extends this same logic to beavers, whose porous dams and underground tunnels disrupt Dutch dikes. What appears to be damage is reframed as ecological repair: the beavers slow down water and recreate lost wetlands.

The non-human actors repairing damaged ecosystems are central to The Mine, which reveals Sloterplas lake as both a site of sand extraction and a habitat for the invasive quagga mussel. This underwater mine is prone to toxic algal blooms. The mussels repair the damaged ecosystem by filtering the algae and purifying the water. Together, these projects propose collective, multispecies resistance as a response to the breakdown of water-control systems. Temporary DIY actions and animal agency become tactics of collective emancipation and ways of rehearsing unavoidable rewetted futures.

What does aluminium dream of? The recycled aluminium in front of you has undergone an immense journey. Every step in its creation is part of a global material metabolism. What happens when we allow the raw material itself to testify to its own origins? Bauxite Dreams is a spatial installation and “sonic essay” that exposes the invisible life cycle of aluminium. The story encompasses the entire supply chain, from the excavation of red bauxite in the tropics and the extreme electrical heat of smelters to the repeated processes of melting and recycling. In this installation, this everyday material is brought to life as a silent witness to geological time and industrial processes.

We rely on systems we hardly notice, until the lights go out or the network fails. But in those moments, another kind of knowledge arises: DIY solutions, forgotten analog technologies, and collective ways of making and being.

Off-Grid collects stories of protest infrastructures assembled in neighborhood yards and encrypted Telegram chats, internet cables stretched between apartment blocks, DIY practices, attempts to build a toaster from scratch, and a self-sustaining research capsule designed to operate for up to 120 days in isolation. This book moves across rural art institutions, repurposed power plants, exhibitions curated within forests and farmlands, and the early digital networks of the 1990s to explore what autonomy can mean in a world built on fragile, interconnected systems—and how much room for maneuver remains within them.

Kinetic Sounds is the result of a long-term Klankvorm research project exploring the relationship between sound, movement and space. Through a series of experiments, rotating sound sources were used to investigate how movement changes the interaction between a speaker and the acoustics of its surroundings.

The installation consists of a collection of custom-built moving speakers that can be arranged in different formations. Each speaker has its own sonic identity, character and movement. In this way different fragments of the frequency range are emphasized and the full sound spectrum is filled.

Kinetic Sounds can be seen as a mechanical orchestra: a fully automated ensemble of robotic musicians in which sound and choreography are directly connected. As the speakers move, they create shifting and immersive fields of sound, transforming the audience’s experience of the space.

The installation also functions as an open platform. Through artist residencies, musicians, composers and artists are invited to create new compositions and live performances for the system. During the opening and closing event concerts will be performed on the installation.

Live performances on the installation will happen on Thursday 24th of September by Maggie Khorrami and Noah Rosa. On Sunday 26th of september Conception Huerta and Puck Wacki & Sou will perform live on the installation. Please check the program page for more info on the artists.

Kinetic Sounds is a Klankvorm production and made possible with the generous support of Creative Industries Fund NL, Mondriaan Fund and City of Rotterdam.

Conduit Chair begins with aluminium offcuts from the inner tubes used in the production of streetlight poles. Their dimensions and form have already been determined by the industrial process from which they originate. Instead of treating these remnants as material that must first be transformed into something new, the design works directly with their existing geometry. The available tubes inform the proportions, construction, and appearance of the chair.
By allowing the residual material to influence the design process, Conduit Chair questions the conventional sequence in which a form is designed first and new material is then sourced to realise it. The work explores what can emerge when material that already exists becomes the starting point.

As a part of the opening of the Conflux exhibition at Katoenhuis, Maggie Khorrami will present a Kinetic Sounds performance.

Maggie Khorrami is a Netherlands-based composer, experimental musician, sound designer, and instrument maker. She studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague and has a background in classical violin and Fine Art. Her work spans electroacoustic performance, sound and light installation, and interactive systems. Her practice is driven by transformation, tension, and the relationship between body and sound, shaping a sonic language that moves between layered electronics, industrial textures, and noise.

A vegan, straight edge noise project of Masami Akita from Japan. Merzbow started out in the noise industrial scene of early 1980s and began releasing music. In the 1990s, Merzbow were influenced by grind core and released an album on the death metal label Relapse. In the late 1990s, he resonated with Mego's "punk computer music" and were one of the first in Japanese Noise Scene to adopt a live performance technique using laptop computers.

Since around 2003, he has practiced veganism from the perspective of "animal rights." He creates works on themes such as "anti-whaling," "anti-dolphin fishing," "anti-fur," and "liberation of livestock animals." In recent years, he has been creating music that is not limited to digital or analog. Recently, he has been experimenting with incorporating AI into album artwork.

He has also collaborated with Balazs Pandi, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, Boris, Keiji Haino, Richard Pinhas (Heldon), Duenn, Nyantra, Lawrence English, Xiu Xiu, Gezan, Alessandro Cortini, Vanity Productions, Vatican Shadow, Bastard Noise, Meat Beat Manifesto and others.

Luonnon Tiloissa, translating to "In States of Nature”, is a collection of work created during an artist residency in southwest Finland in collaboration with composer Moses Kington-Walberg. Through multi-sensory field study and material foraging, we engaged deeply with local birdlife, flora, and coastal terrain. The resulting work encompasses sonic sculptures, woven instruments, and an interconnected network of texture and sound: a delicate dance, a breathing score, and an ode to the Finnish forests and seas that nourished us.

First presented as a newly commissioned performance at one of the inaugural Klankvorm events at V2_ in 2017, Dante’s Circle returns in a new iteration at Conflux 2026, with a site-specific composition developed for the concrete Cathedral of Brutus.

Dante’s Circle is a kinetic and visceral performance by Nicky Assmann and Robert Pravda for six monolithic burners arranged in a circle around a rotating loudspeaker and played as a live instrument.
The automated burners move vertically along the copper panels, heating them and creating continuously changing prismatic colours. The sounds of the burners and heated copper plates become a source for the soundscape, moving through the installation and projected into the space by the kinetic speaker at its centre. The copper plates function both as screens for the iridescent visuals and as acoustic reflectors.

The rotating speaker and the circular choreography of stroboscopic lights, fumes and shadows extend the circle into the architecture of the Cathedral of Brutus. As artefacts of the performance, six uniquely burned, iridescent copper plates remain.

As a part of the opening of the Conflux exhibition at Katoenhuis, Noah Rosa will present a Kinetic Sounds performance.

Noah Rosa crafts atmospheric soundscapes that immerse the listener in an uncanny world, both ancient and futuristic. Exploring themes of environmental devastation, collective myth, the sublime, and nebulous spirituality, his music is bleak yet hopeful. Improvisations are filtered through a prismatic lens of digital degradation, appearing on the other side worn and murky as if emerging from a primeval bed of fungus and algae.

Born on an island in the Pacific Northwest and now based between Berlin and Montreal, his practice spans music and sound design for linear and interactive media, experimental music releases, site-specific sound installations, digital lutherie, and location recording.

Concrete Life emerges from the ruins of capitalism to invoke landscapes of resistance. It exposes the foundations of a system rooted in displacement and exclusionary practices. The flower, as organic matter, resembles our bodies, which resist erasure. Here, its organs reproduce and channel energy from the ground. Metal transforms into a living, fluid force.

This concrete representation of still life portrays nature as a redemptive force. It depicts a nature that is relentlessly colonised or denied, yet almost unfailingly renews itself. Buried beneath the flaws of society, she digs her way upwards, refusing to surrender—and so do we.

Operator is an online radio station and cultural platform dedicated to enriching the music and cultural landscape of Rotterdam and beyond, with a special focus on alternative sounds and underrepresented stories. We curate both on- and offline events, placing emphasis on talent development, experimentation, and nightlife culture. By putting Rotterdam on the map locally, nationally, and internationally, we showcase our creators to the world.

Phoebe Walton will present the methodologies, techniques and work of Forensis and Forensic Architecture (FA). During the lecture, she will share details of counter-forensic investigations, including the Police Killing of Sammy Baker in Amsterdam and the recently published analysis of the Police Killing of Ibrahima Barry in Mülheim (Germany). Through these cases and others, Phoebe will demonstrate how Forensis and FA construct visual and spatial evidence in collaboration with individuals and communities affected by state and corporate violence, and how they use political, cultural and legal forums to advance their demands for justice and accountability.

Also check the Forensic Architecture / Forensis works in the Conflux exhibition at Katoenhuis. Here you can see the Forensis video work Police Killing of Ibrahima Barry and the Forensic Architecture interactive work of Police Killing of Sammy Baker.

Phoebe Walton is a researcher at Forensis, an investigative agency that produces evidence of human rights violations. As the sister-organisation of Forensic Architecture, Forensis works with individuals and communities affected by state and corporate violence to support their demands for justice, reparations and accountability.

With a background in architecture, Phoebe conducts visual and spatial investigations, producing evidence for presentation in legal, political, and cultural forums. She has worked on cases of police brutality, violence towards migrants and refugees and the repression of pro Palestinian solidarity in Germany. With a feminist approach, Phoebe seeks to foreground marginalised voices, integrating technical and forensic methodologies with the situated knowledge of those at the forefront of a struggle.

Find more information about Forensic Architecture and Forensis below.

Puck and Sou treat sonic making as a process of interaction, something that emerges through relating and responding with movement and uncertainty in the realm of modular synthesis. They bring together two practices rooted in listening, improvisation, and live electronic performance, where music lives in the space between body and machine. Alongside the modular system, Puck works with guitar strings and electromagnetic activation, bringing physical resonance into the electronic soundscape. Instruments are patched, probed, and drawn into response, creating a performance that takes shape as a feedback loop through the negotiation between the body’s organic clock and the internal time of the systems.

Chris Tam Nelck, member of the Riso Wizard, is hosting a free Riso workshop. Join them at the Hub for a hands-on protest poster-making workshop with. Using old Conflux posters, flyers, magazines and other scraps, you'll make collages designed for a two-colour Risograph* print.

There will be a short introduction about Riso, including examples and some tips for working with two colours. The printer sadly won’t be at the workshop itself, we’ll focus on analogue image-making, cutting, layering and experimenting with composition. The collages will be printed the following morning, so your freshly printed posters will be ready to collect and presented at the Hub on Saturday.

Free participation. Limited to 7 participants. Sign up via the Google Form below!

Ethereal Empathy is a kinetic textile installation composed of a group of knitted structures that slowly expand, contract, and shift in relation to one another. Developed through experiments with knitting and inspired by coral, the work treats textiles not as passive surfaces, but as responsive bodies capable of holding tension, rhythm, and change. In doing so, it offers an empathetic approach to moments in nature that are gradually disappearing.

Each structure follows a slightly different breathing sequence, allowing individual movements to gradually form a shared pattern, like separate voices becoming an ensemble. The work imagines an ongoing process of adjustment, interdependence, and collective responsiveness: a fragile ecosystem that remains alive by continuously negotiating its relationship with others and with the surrounding space.

Palate Cleanser explores stories and collective memory as lenses through which to trace how the movement of ingredients shapes our understanding of identity and belonging. At Conflux, an open conversation unfolds around the dining table, where the personal meets the collective and food becomes a vessel for stories that travel across time and place. Visitors are invited to taste the offerings and explore the vernacular role of produce in Thai cuisine, set against the ways in which ingredients and supply chains shape Dutch dining culture.

For migrant communities, the toko is more than a place to find familiar flavours. It is a space where cultural memories, identities, and connections to home are maintained. For local residents, it can also serve as an entry point for encountering and imagining other cultures. The products on its shelves present a particular cultural landscape.

Although packaging may appear neutral, it reflects market demands and existing perceptions of culture. Through the repeated use of visual symbols, colours, and aesthetics, these representations can reinforce familiar ideas of cultural identity. At the same time, packaging becomes a form of self-representation, reflecting how migrant communities interpret and communicate their own cultures while negotiating historically shaped ways of seeing and relations of power. The toko is therefore not simply a place of commerce, but a space where cultural identity is continuously negotiated between self-representation, market expectations, and the perceptions of a new place of belonging.

sign.nah is a Rotterdam-based writer, DJ, and organizer. At Conflux, they present de:fi, a sociopolitical music archive and ongoing research into the sounds of defiance, resilience, and liberation. In this session, they will debut de-fi.media, a developing online archive mapping sounds and music connected to various liberation movements across the globe.

Siuli K.O. is always on the hunt for fresh, forward-thinking sounds in bass and leftfield beats. In the 90s, she was at the foundation of the notorious Acid Planet and Industrial Funk parties, and of experimental labels Grijs and Nocturnal State, deep within The Hague's OG underground scene, connected to Unit Moebius, Curley Esoteric, and Spiral Tribe's Network 23.

But she could never stop following her ears, and it was only a matter of time before they led her to London, where she joined the electrobass crew around Radioactive Man, Dexorcist and Audio Illusion. From there, her ears pulled her further still, into post-dubstep, and a deep love for the Bristol sound, opening up the path to the contemporary leftfield fusion of electronics she's known for today.

After a long hiatus, she's back behind the decks on a regular basis, making appearances at Club Laak and Future Intel, and running her biweekly K.O. Show on Radio Tonka / Den Haag FM. Endlessly restless and forever chasing that ultimate sound, she fuses her deep heritage of Bristol and Worldly percussion with pounding Bass and flowy Tek into an irresistible blend she calls Industrial Funk. Expect her to set the dancefloor alight.

Cecile is a lecturer, curator, moderator, and artist. Her work operates at the intersection of debate, philosophy, and art. She is part of the artistic team of the new Rotterdam art space Social Art Platform and teaches in the Leisure & Events Management programme at the Willem de Kooning Academy. She regularly moderates at Debatpodium Arminius and hosts a radio show at Operator Radio.

15:00–16:30 — Panel talks by Cecile van Bruggen: Radio Resistance and What’s Up in the Hub?

15:00 - 15:45 — Radio Resistance with Pim (Operator Radio) Matthijs (Maxi Radio) and Bardo (Radio Tonka)

15:45 - 16:30 — What’s up in the Hub? With Underbelly, (un)repair café and visitor experience

Cecile is a lecturer, curator, moderator, and artist. Her work operates at the intersection of debate, philosophy, and art. She is part of the artistic team of the new Rotterdam art space Social Art Platform and teaches in the Leisure & Events Management programme at the Willem de Kooning Academy. She regularly moderates at Debatpodium Arminius and hosts a radio show at Operator Radio.

14:00–16:00 — Talks by Cecile van Bruggen with Stimuleringsfonds talents and CF26 artists
14:00–14:30 — Politics and Poetics with Hung Lu Chan and Justyna Chmielewska
14:30–15:00 — Hacking Systems with Yufei Gao, Jan Zuiderveld and Xinyi Zhang
15:15–16:00 — Sonic Action with Animistic Beliefs and Maggie Khorrami

Tools for Action develops new forms of assembly and political action through participatory performances, open source skill-sharing workshops, and large-scale inflatable social sculptures. Monumental yet fragile, playful yet confrontational, these inflatable tools become mobile barricades, swarms, and tactical media interventions through choreographed direct-action training. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism, memory culture, and queer and trans* visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity, and collective imagination.

Founded in Berlin in 2012 and emerging from the former Eclectic Electric Collective, Tools for Action has worked internationally in shifting constellations of artists and activists. Since 2019, the collective has operated from Rotterdam through the Tools for Action Foundation. Core collaborators have included Bambi Benkö (formerly Artúr van Balen), Katherine Ball, Jakub Simcik, Tilly Gifford, Sarah Drain, Pascal Espinosa, and Shailoh Phillips.

TYN is fuelled by an insatiable passion for everything cutting-edge. Driven by a curiosity for uncovering rare musical gems from obscure places, TYN takes listeners on unique journeys through unexplored soundscapes. His DJ sets are transformative experiences, revealing new auditory landscapes and pushing the limits of club culture. Rooted in the spirit of innovation and dipping from a vast pool of music, he pushes boundaries and seamlessly melds the future with echoes of the past.

Few musicians in techno work to sound like no other - Wallis is one of them. A producer, live act, and DJ, she constantly pushes her music into new realms, always searching for something new in a genre that can sometimes struggle to reinvent itself. More at ease building worlds in the studio than chasing the spotlight, her output is driven by obsession, detail, and pure creative instinct.

Her catalog speaks for itself: her DJ sets are packed with mostly her own unreleased material. While many follow trends, Wallis has carved a sound that feels hers unmistakably - unique, distinctive, and future-facing. She only cares about where her music was yesterday and how far she can push it tomorrow. Her recent releases Protect Me From My Friends and Goodbye Berlin deliver exactly that: a much-needed dose of originality in techno.

Wallis has toured across almost every continent, equally at home on a large stage or in a small, intimate, sweaty basement. She has played some of the world’s most respected techno spaces, including Berghain, Basement NYC, and Vent Tokyo, as well as festivals such as Sónar, Parklife, and Nuits Sonores. Beyond the club, she recently produced the music for the Natasha Zinko runway show at London Fashion Week.

wRec is a Rotterdam based project by DJ/producer duo DJ Shahmaran & Himera. Shifting between dark and light, harsh and tender, playful and vulnerable sounds, wRec; is a voyage into distilled dreams and lucid visions of hope amongst wreckage in the form of club music and soundscapes.

The Shrine is a multidimensional sonic project that invites listeners into the contemplative heart of Sufi devotion. Drawing from field recordings of Sufi chants and invocations gathered across Egypt, Senegal, and Algeria, the work weaves together urban soundscapes and transcendent spirituality, creating an auditory journey that bridges time, place, and consciousness.

At its core, The Shrine is inspired by tasbih—the ritual repetition of divine names—and the broader practice of dhikr, through which Sufis cultivate remembrance, purification, and union with the Divine. This project transforms these sacred utterances into sound waves using the Abjad numerological system, where each Arabic letter corresponds to a numerical value. By converting sacred phrases into digital frequencies, the work reveals a hidden sonic dimension within the text, where language, number, and emotion converge.

Through a synthesis of mystical tradition and contemporary sound technology, *The Shrine* becomes more than an auditory experience—it is a sensory meditation on divine love, longing, and spiritual transformation. It reflects Yara Mekawei’s ongoing exploration of the intersections between antiquity and modernity, the spiritual and the coded, the spoken word and its invisible resonance.

The Shrine does not merely represent Sufi philosophy—it embodies it, offering a space for reflection, presence, and transcendence.

Besides presenting her installation 'The Shrine' at Katoenhuis as part of the exhibition Tactics for Cultural Resistance, Yara Mekawei will further expand on her artistic practice during an artist talk at the Conflux Conference at Keilepand.

Sonic sculptor, composer and scholar Yara Mekawei operates at the threshold, where urban pulse meets mythic echo, where Coptic breath and the Book of The Dead converge with algorithmic code. Ancient texts and scriptures are her music composition source.

She transmutes the ambient rhythms of cities, the liturgical whispers of Sufi antiquity, and the poetic geometries of esoteric texts into immersive divin-sonic architectures that dissolve borders between history and identity.

The auditory alchemy; a synesthetic ritual that turns sound into space, silence into structure. A chant’s glory, a kinetic installation. Breath, mapped as collective memory. This is transubstantiation, not translation. For Mekawei, sound is vessel, voyage, and verb: carrying ancestral wisdom, threading temporal layers, speaking across sensorial divides.

As AI develops, its demand for data increases. Data is to AI what a cookie is to the always-hungry Cookie Monster. The more data it consumes, the harder it becomes to interpret its thought processes when learning or making decisions. This mysterious process is referred to as a “black box”. However, this idea extends beyond the mathematical. AI’s environmental costs, energy consumption, and the misalignment between its values and ours are all black boxes in their own right.

In a series of absurd, performative video essays, Yufei Gao embodies the Cookie Monster to demonstrate how it operates and consumes. The video installation is a research project that aims to understand the Cookie Monster and its impact on the world.

For Conflux Festival 2026, Zoro Feigl is creating a new commissioned work that builds on his ongoing exploration of movement, repetition, and balance. Through the continuous motion of simple sculptural elements, Feigl transforms mechanical movement into something fluid and seemingly natural. The forms appear as though they might have been found in nature, discovered rather than constructed.

As their movements begin to depart from what feels natural, however, their rhythms become unsettling. The work plays with this tension between the familiar and the artificial, challenging our perception of what is real and what is constructed. Through repetition, movement becomes both mesmerising and disorienting, shifting between elegance, instability, and discomfort.

This work is commissioned by Conflux Festival.