ELEVATE DISCOURSE 2026: “Vital Signs – Between Collapse and Renewal”

At its 2026 edition, Elevate's discourse programme explores how vitality can be sustained or newly generated within systems that often appear exhausted and under immense pressure - in the economy and the climate, in political institutions, in media ecosystems, or social relations.

Through lectures, discussions, film screenings and performances, we ask how new forms of social, cultural and political agency can emerge in times of societal fatigue, systemic crisis and political regression.

What signals of renewal and regeneration emerge beyond normative ideas of health, productivity or efficiency? What viable scenarios open up when artificial contradictions - climate vs. prosperity, innovation vs. regulation, security vs. welfare - are overcome?

The challenges are immense. In economic policy, democracy, digital life and security issues, but so are our collective capacities to create something new.

Even when it may not seem so: the world is full of solutions, and it is far too late for pessimism.