MANIFEST:IO is more than a symposium for new media art- it is a space for listening, exchange, and collective building. With a focus on plural identities and interdisciplinary practices, the event becomes fertile ground for experiences that cross physical, symbolic, and emotional borders. In the 2025 Berlin edition, the workshop Letters Without Borders, led by NYC-based artists Clara Francesca and Anne Wichmann in collaboration with Spatial Media Lab, invited participants into a sensitive investigation of co-creation.

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The workshop began with a central question: how we can bridge the distance created by language, migration, and fragmented identities — and transform that space into something shared. From this premise, we were invited to write letters, record sounds, and inhabit the instability between languages, tempos, and gestures. We spoke the same words in different languages, produced sound both simultaneously and individually — each person finding their own rhythm and expression, free from hierarchy or correction.

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Inside the spatial sound dome, the result came to life. The piece responded to touch and pulsed with presence — not linear, but layered. It was a sonic landscape that embraced the contradictions in the process. Listening became touching. Speaking became silence. Each fragment was part of a whole that didn’t ask to be resolved, only to be felt.

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As someone who migrates between places, this space of in-betweenness is familiar to me — and to many others. We often carry fragmented identities, learning to exist in movement. Feeling at home becomes an ongoing construction — shaped as much by absence as by reinvention. The workshop offered more than artistic exploration; it became a shared ground where we didn’t need to justify or translate ourselves, but could simply exist and create from within our complexity.

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Letters Without Borders reminded us that what separates us can also connect us — if we allow for collective presence, if we listen across differences. In this gathering, distance wasn’t something to overcome, but something to inhabit. And through that, we found new ways to be together — not despite fragmentation, but because of it.

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The Letters Without Borders workshop took place during MANIFEST:IO 2025 before the festival opening. Participants were invited to create a collective piece that would then be exhibited during the symposium. Led by NYC-based collective XR Ensemble in collaboration with Berlin-based Spatial Media lab and video designer Antonia Angel.

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