Elom 20ce is a pan-African activist, artist, designer, filmmaker, performer, poet, and rapper. He defines himself as a “Knocker of the invisible”.
To close the exhibition “THE CURRENCY LAB – tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs 三” by Musquiqui Chihying, Gregor Kasper and Elom 20ce, he will give a concert at the Forplay Society on Saturday 31.
This performance will explore the link between music, social justice and spirituality. Elom 20ce will be accompanied on stage by local musicians.
THE CURRENCY LAB – tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs 三 – Multichannel Video Installation – Opening 23. Jan 26 – 6 PM
Elom 20ce (Togo), Musquiqui Chihying (Taiwan) & Gregor Kasper (DE)
23.Jan 26 – 31.Jan 26
THE CURRENCY
As part of their transcontinental, multidisciplinary, collective practice, Elom 20ce (Togo),
Musquiqui Chihying (Taiwan), and Gregor Kasper (Germany) explore the possibilities of
questioning currencies, capitalist logics, exploitation, and power structures in order to re-examine
the relationships between humans and their interactions with the non-human world.
tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs
The presentation at Forplay Society focuses on tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs – a fictional term written in
phonetic transcription that combines the two fields of technology and magic in a multi-layered way.
It creates a framework, a working method, and an interdisciplinary space that explores connections
between technology and cosmology.
tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs sees itself as a polyphonic orchestra consisting of a sea of harmonies and
dissonances, absorbing different frequencies, vibrations, sounds, and rhythms to create a symphonic
assemblage.
At its center is the cinematic trilogy tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs from THE CURRENCY’s Sensing series. It is
a fluid, polyphonic journey of three stops on the Gulf of Guinea: Agbogbloshie—the rough, world’s
largest recycling site for electronic waste in Accra, Ghana; Ladipo – a dense market for used car
parts in Lagos, Nigeria; and Kailend – an idyllic ecological farm and alternative grassroots school at
the foot of Togo’s highest mountain, Agou.
In these special places, tɛknoʊmædʒɪkɛs explores the connections between different technological
and spiritual spheres and questions the values of life beyond the economic logic of global
capitalism. In doing so, it follows different cycles of life and death, permanent processes of
recycling and rebirth, and explores different frequencies, rhythms, and voices from the visible and
invisible worlds.
Supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations)
a bird flies, a stone is thrown will be presented as a collateral exhibition, running parallel to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–26. Opening on 10 January 2026, this moving-image installation unfolds as a series of living tableaux in which performers shift between the roles of witness, victim, and perpetrator. Through these fluid positions, the work reflects on fragility, vulnerability, and forms of quiet resistance that persist across histories and lived experiences.
The Gujral Foundation is delighted to support this endeavour, co-presented by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Pune.
📍Forplay Society, Opposite Kaycee Corporation, Bazaar Road, Mattancherry
Solo performance by Quentin Aurat 7 PM.. the pickling workshop with maya minder begins 3 pm at the balcony up top ..
Forplay Society is thrilled to host the French sound artist and instrument builder Quentin Aurat for an immersive solo performance. Moving at the intersection of raw noise, DIY electronics, and radical improvisation, Aurat’s work is a physical exploration of sonic limits.
Quentin Aurat doesn’t just play instruments; he manipulates circuits. His performances are centered around self-constructed DIY devices and unconventional sound-generators, creating a dense, tactile landscape of textures. From delicate micro-noises to overwhelming walls of sound, his approach is a testament to the “hacker” ethic in contemporary experimental music—deconstructing technology to find the soul within the machine.
For anyone interested in the aesthetics of Industrial, Glitch, and Hardware-based Noise, this performance is an essential experience in the intimate setting of Fort Kochi’s premier laboratory for sonic arts.
Pickling, Preserving and Fermentation is a precious heritage of ancient human food cultures. It is preserved until today by the many hands and minds that care and nurture communities. Fermenting food is an inherent knowledge transferred orally to those willing to learn with heart to head to hand. Within this workshop the participants will learn techniques of pickling and fermentation. Food processing as part of a community activity will be shared in a day unfolding into food stories and shared convivial meals. Come and learn how to produce Indian pickles (achars), Korean kimchi and German sauerkraut or Italian antipasti and learn about the holistic process involved that is well guarded by grandmums and aunties’ wisdom.
About the project:
After a harvest in food forests in the Western Ghats, the performance Lines to Follow, Soils to Gather involves a workshop on transforming the harvest into fermented pickles and achars for low-impact food transportation. The workshop will be led by artist Maya Minder in collaboration with Alchemy kitchen at Forplay Society. The prepared pickles will be transferred a week later to the Arka Kinari, a floating cultural platform visiting the Kochi-Muziris Biennale on its sailing journey to the Mediterranean Sea. This project is a collateral of the Soil Assembly.
The pickling workshop will be followed by a convivial meal by Daniela Zambrano Almidón (PER) and a noise performance by Quentin Aurat (FR)
Open to all. Participants are encouraged to bring to the workshop: apron, cutting board and knife, small pickling jar.
🗓️Date: 28th January 2026
🕒Time: 3 PM – 8 PM
📍Venue: Forplay Society, Bazaar Road, Mattancherry
For more than a century, the small town of Hohnstein has been closely associated with the art of hand puppetry. The famous Hohnstein Kasper, developed by puppeteer Max Jacob and woodcarver Theo Eggink, became one of the most influential figures in German puppetry and shaped a distinctive carving tradition that continues to this day.
In the Hohnstein Carving Workshop, this tradition is now being carried forward as a living craft. Since 2024, puppet maker and theatrical sculptor Elisabeth Trobisch has been continuing the traditional carving of Hohnstein hand puppets, working in the spirit of the historic models while also exploring contemporary approaches.
The workshop invites participants to actively engage with this unique craft. Under professional guidance, you will learn the fundamentals of hand puppet carving and experience the transformation of raw material into a character with personality and expression. No prior experience is required—curiosity, patience, and an interest in craftsmanship are all you need.
Whether you are interested in puppetry, woodcarving, theatre, or cultural heritage, this workshop offers a rare opportunity to take part in a century-old tradition and contribute to its future in Hohnstein.
📅 Date: 26th to 27th January 2026
⏰ Time: 2 PM to 5 PM
📍 Venue: ABC Art Room, Bastion Bungalow, Fort Kochi
Free entry — no registration fee required.
Tonight, the Forplay Society will be transformed into a laboratory of the moment. When Dresden saxophone visionary Hartmut Dorschner meets Sekhar Sudir’s virtuoso violin and Nodhar Akhulediani’s soundscapes, it’s not songs that are created—it’s universes.
Three musicians, three cultures, one common language: freedom. Come and witness a unique dialogue that will never happen again.
📍 Where: Forplay Society, Fort Kochi
🎟️ Admission: free/Donation
Curated by Æther / Voin de Voin for Forplay society at Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Collateral program
Voin de Voin is an artist whose practice unfolds through a symbiotic relationship with his cosmic other Æther, together forming a single, interdependent matter. This dual presence operates as both method and material, form and dimaterialisation, dissolving boundaries between author and process.
Their work centers on collective rituals and shared modes of working, emphasizing collaboration as a form of knowledge production. Through participatory structures and communal acts, they explore how meaning is generated, transmitted, and transformed when creation becomes a collective endeavor rather than an individual gesture and the potenciality of that energy.
By fostering processes of cooperation, exchange, and learning, Voin de Voin and Æther investigate art as a living system—one that emerges through shared ideas, psychic archeology, ritualized interaction, and the continual circulation of knowledge.
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
A platform for collective dreaming and psychic archaeology.
In the Shelter of Shared Imagination.
There are transmissions that exceed intention. Long after the event has passed, their presence remains.
They do not ask to be remembered.
They remember for us.
Some gifts do not come wrapped in meaning. They pass silently through proximity, through repetition, through the atmospheric residue of the unsaid. They do not require consent. They embed. They linger. They return. Not because they were invited, but because they cannot be dismissed.
This exhibition takes that condition, not as metaphor, but as architecture. It explores the radical potential of dreaming together not merely as an escape, but as a generative and political act. Across cultures and histories, dreams have served as maps, messages, and mirrors offering insight, healing, and sometimes prophecy. When these dreams are shared, whether in conversation, ritual, or image, they begin to shape a language beyond logic, one that resists the rational enclosures of the waking world.
The artists and practitioners in this journey navigate this terrain through diverse forms and practices, building a constellation of work over three weeks. Their investigations illuminate the tension between the intimate and the collective, between individual psyche and social fabric. What emerges is not a single dream, but a living network fleeting and fluid of many.
At the heart of this exhibition is a question: What happens when we give ourselves permission to dream together?
Can we envision new architectures of care, kinship, and resistance? Can collective dreaming serve as rehearsal for more liberated futures?
We enter the exhibition as individuals; we leave as part of a larger dreaming body stitched together by invisible threads, by memory, by longing, by the quiet insistence of what still wants to be felt.
The commons of sleep expands, encompassing all who dare to close their eyes not to escape, but to imagine otherwise.
The gift persists. It moves through us. It dreams us forward.
The recent past has delivered to the global collective a rupture—an epistemic shock that dismantled the narratives of progress, stability, and evolutionary advancement that many had assumed were inevitable. Instead of the promised arc toward improvement, we entered a zone of extremity: wars unfolding with genocidal clarity, systemic cruelty fully visible, and a pervasive sense that the apocalyptic visions once confined to scripture may no longer be metaphor, but documentation.
This rupture did not arise as a singular event, but as a series of layered unveilings. Each crisis revealed another structure beneath it, forming an endless regress of nested mechanisms—like a stack of babushka dolls, each holding and protecting its own interior logic of domination. These systems, while appearing to offer safety, function as illusion-machines, producing a choreography of control that keeps subjects compliant, fragmented, and afraid.
In this climate, the human condition itself did not simply deteriorate—it underwent a profound disassembly. The frameworks through which we understand ourselves were crushed. We experienced a symbolic death: of trust, of continuity, of the belief that history necessarily bends toward justice. Emerging from this collapse, we were forced into a new condition: not chosen, not prepared for, but imposed—a condition defined by the triumph of the capitalist myth.
This myth operates not as a story but as an ontological force. It reconfigures reality by rewarding poverty with moralization, normalizing human and nonhuman sacrifice as economic “necessity,” and elevating the lie over the truth through systems engineered for virality, not veracity. Technology amplifies these distortions through algorithmic architectures of manipulation, producing subjects who are divided, surveilled, and rendered perpetually adversarial. The dream of a unified social body fractures into competing micro-realities, each calibrated for maximum extraction.
Historically, new mythologies emerge from the depths—from degradation, despair, and the psychic pits of collective trauma. They arise not as luxuries, but as survival mechanisms, constructed when humanity reaches for something to believe in, something to hold, something to orient toward when the dominant narrative collapses.
The project presented here positions itself within this threshold:
as an attempt to fracture the capitalist myth at the level of symbolic production,
and to re-engage with older, subversive, and suppressed modes of knowing.
Drawing from pagan ritual practices, witchcraft, ancestral memory, healing traditions, lucid dreaming, psychic archaeology, and emergent biotechnological methodologies, the platform proposes a re-imagining of the human condition—one that is not linear, rationalized, or optimized, but plural, porous, and interdependent.
We propose that the human mind cannot be understood as a singular, coherent unity. Instead, it resembles an internal ecology—a polyphony of processes, subsystems, ancestral residues, and emergent signals operating simultaneously. It is a society within the skull: a site of negotiation, conflict, cooperation, and myth-making.
In this model, universal truths are not fixed axioms but experiential structures that can be re-encountered, reactivated, and re-sensed.
By naming our collective fears, we perform an act of theoretical archaeology.
By speaking them aloud, we create a space where these fears become analyzable rather than paralyzing.
By listening—attentively, vulnerably—to the deepest strata of our new perceptual condition, we open pathways for alternative epistemologies to surface.
The work invites participants into the “forbidden zone”—a conceptual and affective territory where forms of sharing, vulnerability, and communal reflection are not only discouraged but systematically erased. In entering this zone, we engage in a counter-movement: a collective excavation. We dig through the coal-mines of the mind, unearthing new mythologies from the strata of a broken world, and searching for emergent forms of meaning, solidarity, and psychic reconstruction.
This platform is not a return, nor a retreat, nor a utopian projection.
It is an experiment in re-constituting the human condition after collapse—
a space to practice new senses, new rituals, new languages, and new forms of relation.
A site where myth becomes methodology,
and where the fragments of our shattered present might be rearranged into a future that does not simply replicate the violence of the past.
And in the deepest chamber of this descent, something begins to glow—
what the old ones might have called the gift that keeps on giving…
The platform is carried out by
Antje Engelmann (DE), Sarah Burger (CH), Susanne Weisse (DE), Anton Stoianov (DE/BG), Julian Weber (DE), Iv Toshain (AU), Johannah Herr (USA), Eva Meyer/Eran Schaerf (DE), Rosemarie Trockel(DE), Nia Pushkarova (BG), PPKK (DE, GR), Galina Dimitrova (BG), Jeanette Groenendaal (NL), Mariana Tantcheva (NL/BG), Sandra Zanetti (USA/UK), knives aka Mihika Bedi (DE/IN), Lola Göller (DE), Kiril Bikov (BG/DE), Kinga Kielczynska (PL), Alexander Yuzev (BG), Natalia Jordanova (Nl/BG), Sarah van Lamsweerde (NL), Lubri (BG), Malina Suliman Nl/AF), Elitsa Mateva (BG), Valentina Bardazzi (IT), Avril Stormy Unger (IN), Dissosiative Dreams (CAN)
Graphic design by : Elena Chergilanova
Supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations)
PØNG consists of two musicians who come from very different musical backgrounds.
One has been performing as a DJ and live act at techno parties in Europe, America and Australia since the 1990s. In 1994, he co-founded base-industries, one of the first German free techno sound systems. He has also produced music for theatre and dance productions and for music festivals.
The other one is a trained saxophonist and composer of new music. He is a well-known musician in free improvisation and free jazz since many years. Since working as a freelance musician, he has collaborated countless times with renowned artists from various artistic fields and has received various commissions in different countries.
The result of this collaboration is captivating, danceable and sometimes unclassifiable music. A melodic layer builds up on the basis of basses and beats, which partly follows clear lines and partly flies away, freely improvised.
The centrepiece of the live act, an oversized analogue synthesiser, takes centre stage and is a mystery that is sometimes difficult to fathom with its flashing lights and seemingly tangled cables.
Multi-award winning experimental pop auteur, Sasha Perera aka Perera Elsewhere is a producer,musician, songwriter and DJ who has garnered critical acclaim from Pitchfork, NPR, BBC,FADER, Vogue, KCRW and many more.Her use of technology to create and to experiment with her voice, lyrics, trumpet, percussive beats,bass frequencies, sound design and existential ideas all led to what fans and press initially coinedthe ‘Doom-Folk’ sound of the Perera Elsewhere project. She found a home on Los Angeles basedlabel Friends of Friends where she has released 3 albums that have seen her sonic imprintgraciously evolve and evoke a hybrid of comparisons from Mica Levi to Dean Blunt, Jon Hassell orMassive Attack.Journeys have punctuated Perera Elsewhere’s life perspective and career, taking her from London’svibrant club scene to Berlin’s bass experimentalist underground and forming her shapeshiftingapproach to music. Elsewhere, but always rooted, Perera has found herself at home in musicallydiverse arenas–from live shows & DJ sets at institutions such as Berghain, Guggenheim, HamburgPhilharmonic, Sonar Festival and Boiler Room.Her music has been licensed for Ava Du Vernay’s ‘Queen Sugar’ series, by Oscar winning directorPaolo Sorrentino for his ‘Loro’ film and recently by Apple for the promotional launch of their fasterthan ever M2 chip.A true multi-hyphenate, Perera’s open and autodidact technique is also highlighted by a long list ofside releases, collaborations as well as bespoke compositions for moving image, theatre and audio-visual installations for leading global institutions such as Bass Museum Miami (2022 and ZKM inKarlsruhe (2024). She produced 4 songs for German icon Nina Hagen’s recent album (2023) andwon ‘Best Act ’at the VIA awards 2022, the only independent award for musical innovation inGermany. Perera also won Sony Music Germany’s ‘Female Producer Award’ in 2024.Perera’s published works have led to invitations by renowned institutions such as Ableton, NativeInstruments, Yale or Berlin’s University of Arts and the award- winning Errrormusic programme toshare her creative knowledge via studio sessions, workshops, teaching, and mentoring. Sasha hasalso worked with the British Council and Goethe Institute as an artist and co-curator or mentor onmusic projects and music-tech education initiatives across Asia and Africa . She recently composedthe sound for a Kampnagel dance/ theatre production titled’ Reparation Nation.’ Perera Elsewhere is clearly at home in many places.