EMIGRATION TO THE FUTURE

Smart Emigration to the Future is the popular-science strand of Emigration to the Future, running across the same three days as the festival.

The idea is simple: the future arrives faster than we can read the news about it. So we asked scientists — all of them with an emigration story — to catch us up on what’s happening at the cutting edge of their fields, in plain language.

Our first two speakers — with more names to come:

Dr. Ana Ventura Barroso — physicist

🎤 Talk: “From Big Bang to Ground Zero and Back: Physics, War and Peace”

Ana is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hamburg Nuclear Disarmament Laboratory at Universität Hamburg, where she develops technical solutions for eliminating nuclear weapons programmes.


Nikolai Trofimov — geoscientist, PhD candidate at the University of Bremen

🎤 Talk: “From Earth to Wine: Geoscience in Your Glass”

Rocks are his thing.
Come for the wine, stay for the geology. Or the other way around — we won’t judge.

More names to come.


Berlin-Wedding, 7–9 August

We're looking for volunteers

"The Emigration to the Future festival needs volunteers and performers — in vast, unlimited numbers. Or rather: performers and volunteers, because we don't separate the two roles. There's a whole mass of art projects here, across every genre — dance performances, plays, artworks — and they need participants on one side and, on the other, people to help build them, to make it all actually happen. The authors, the performers — they're all volunteers too. Right now I'm filming this by a monument to the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. There's a small symbolism in that: with a real stretch, you could call the internationalists of those years volunteers too."

So — come and be one. The festival needs volunteers and performers for 7–9 August in Berlin-Wedding, plus a couple of set-up days before. No experience needed; one language (English, German or Russian) is enough, and for most roles none at all.

Write us — Instagram DM or Vsevollys@gmail.com — with four things: your name, the languages you speak, what you'd like to do, and when you're free.

Wir suchen Freiwillige

"Das Festival Emigration to the Future braucht Freiwillige und Performer:innen — in großer, unbegrenzter Zahl. Genauer gesagt: Performer:innen und Freiwillige, denn wir trennen diese beiden Rollen nicht. Es gibt hier eine Fülle von Kunstprojekten aller Genres — Tanzperformances, Theaterstücke, Kunstwerke — und sie brauchen auf der einen Seite Mitwirkende und auf der anderen Menschen, die beim Aufbau helfen, die das Ganze überhaupt möglich machen. Die Autor:innen, die Performer:innen — sie alle sind ebenfalls Freiwillige. Gerade filme ich das hier an einem Denkmal für die Internationalen Brigaden des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs. Darin liegt eine kleine Symbolik: mit etwas gutem Willen könnte man auch die Internationalist:innen jener Jahre Freiwillige nennen."

Also: komm und werde eine:r. Das Festival braucht Freiwillige und Performer:innen für den 7.–9. August in Berlin-Wedding, dazu ein paar Aufbautage davor. Keine Erfahrung nötig; eine Sprache (Englisch, Deutsch oder Russisch) genügt, für die meisten Aufgaben gar keine.

Schreib uns — per Instagram-DM oder an Vsevollys@gmail.com — mit vier Angaben: deinem Namen, den Sprachen, die du sprichst, was du machen möchtest und wann du Zeit hast.

Ищем волонтёров

«Фестивалю „Эмиграция в будущее" требуются — в большом, ничем не ограниченном количестве — волонтёры и перформеры. Точнее, перформеры и волонтёры, потому что эти функции у нас не разделены. Здесь масса художественных проектов самых разных жанров — танцевальные перформансы, спектакли, произведения искусства — и им нужны, с одной стороны, участники, а с другой — люди, которые помогут всё это смонтировать, реализовать. И авторы, и перформеры — все они тоже волонтёры. Сейчас я снимаю это видео у памятника интернациональной бригаде времён гражданской войны в Испании. В этом есть немного символизма: с большой натяжкой, но интернационалистов тех лет тоже можно назвать волонтёрами».

Так вот — приходите и станьте одним из них. Фестивалю нужны волонтёры и перформеры на 7–9 августа в Берлине-Веддинге и на пару дней монтажа до этого. Опыт не нужен; хватит одного языка (английского, немецкого или русского), а для большинства задач не нужен и он.

Напишите нам — в Instagram Direct или на Vsevollys@gmail.com — и укажите четыре вещи: имя, языки, которыми владеете, что хотели бы делать и когда свободны.

#EmigrationToTheFuture #BerlinWedding #Volunteers

"Hi, my name is Shifra Kazhdan, and I wonder — what should stop us from presenting a new audio piece,"

Shifra Kazhdan is staging *Realists*, an audio play, inside a real Berlin apartment — a piece you don't watch so much as overhear.

There's no stage and no exposition. The audience steps into a residential interior and listens to the everyday talk of a triad family — three adults living together, negotiating love, care, and desire, as if the conversations were simply happening and you had walked in on them.

*Realists* treats the apartment as a small, already-arrived utopia: a temporary microcosm of the city where a different way of living together is not argued for, only overheard. The play runs in two versions — one with a fully male cast, one with a fully female cast — in English and German, rehearsed over Zoom until it lands in a room you can stand inside.

Shifra Kazhdan is one of the artists rehearsing a livable future with us.

7–9 August
Berlin

Meet Vsevolod Lisovsky — the person behind Emigration to the Future.



In his own words: he'll liberate artificial intelligence and grant it subjecthood. He'll medically cure people of capitalism. He'll offer sacrifices for the future. He'll decode the shelves of Lidl as a cipher of dark prophecy.



But — also his words — the main work is the festival itself: a standalone art project, total theatre, 7–9 August in Berlin-Wedding, built with 40 artists from 7 countries.



This is the tone the whole festival runs on. Watch to the end.



#EmigrationToTheFuture #BerlinWedding

Daniil Zinchenko remakes Hansel and Gretel as video art.

The fairy tale is about children lost in a dark wood who find a house made of food — refuge and trap in the same place.

Reimagined now, it asks: what is the forest? Who is the witch? When everything you took for shelter turns out to be appetite, where do you go?

The story holds.
Taken seriously — as displacement and survival, not a cute update.

Daniil Zinchenko is one of the artists rehearsing a livable future with us.

7–9 August
Berlin

Vasya Berezin runs 100 kilometers — and then plays.

That’s the whole structure of Long-Distance Running: exertion first, art after.

The piece is minimalist in the most literal sense: nothing extra, only gesture. It asks you to feel the difference between watching a body move fast and watching the same body sit still with an instrument.

A question about exhaustion and creativity.
About what you make when the energy has already been spent.

Simple enough to understand in thirty seconds.
Deep enough to stay with you after.

Vasya Berezin is one of the artists rehearsing a livable future with us.

7–9 August
Berlin

#EmigrationToTheFuture

🎈Become part of 𝗘𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 — we're looking for volunteers. 🔎

It's a three-day festival of interdisciplinary utopias in Berlin-Wedding, 𝟳–𝟵 𝗔𝘂𝗴𝘂𝘀𝘁.

We'll need a hand from a couple of days before, to set everything up, and across all three festival days. Where help is needed:

👯 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 — support the artists at rehearsals and shows. No experience needed.

👻 𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲𝘀 — welcome guests, wayfinding and logistics.

🤳 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 — photo, video and stories from the heart of it.

There are softer ways in, too — no strings, no commitment. Run a Telegram channel or have an audience of your own? You could tell people about us. Just want to be around this and meet the people building it? Write, and let's talk.

Interested? Write us — 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺 𝗗𝗠 or Vsevollys@gmail.com — and tell us four things: your name, what you can do, what you'd like to do, and when you're free.

The festival is led by two curators: 𝗩𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝘀𝗼𝘃𝘀𝗸𝘆, its interdisciplinary commissar and initiator, and 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝘀𝗸𝘆, street-art historian and artist. Together with the artists, they're the people you'd be building this with.

Emigration to the Future

An interdisciplinary festival of utopias · Berlin · 7–9 August 2026

This is our official Telegram. Here's the whole idea.

You can't act in the present if you can't picture the future. So instead of emigrating to another country, we're emigrating to the future — and projecting it back onto the real city of Berlin. The move is tactical: it's far easier to attack the present from the future than the other way around. For three days we build positive versions of what's coming and test how they'd actually fit a real street, a real U-Bahn, a real Berlin.

It was started by migrants, but it isn't only for them. The whole point of the future is that there are no natives and no foreigners in it — no professionals and no amateurs.

The shape of it. At least three venues: two open-air (one in central Berlin, one out in nature at the city's edge) and one indoor for talks, concerts and screenings. Two tracks — a curated Main Program, and a Parallel Program that runs on a single rule: do what you want. Performances, installations, film, music, literature, and experiments that don't have a genre yet. Among the threads we're chasing: futures built inside public transport, "spatial comics" that rewrite city objects, diasporas from the future, and one entirely straight-faced special project — Propaganda for AI, complete with a competition to design a monument to the hero of the digital revolution: the Terminator.

The people behind it. Curated by street-art historian Anton Polsky and interdisciplinary commissar Vsevolod Lisovsky. Crowdfunded, volunteer-powered, no corporate gloss.

Why this channel. It's where everything lands first — the programme as it's confirmed, the artists and their projects, open calls for volunteers and collaborators, and the practical stuff: venues, timing, how to get there.

Subscribe, turn on notifications, and bring the people you'd want building a future beside you.

The present is doomed — let's rehearse a better one.

Channel created