FIBER 2025 | Community Meet-Ups

Connecting the in-between

During this year’s festival edition, we invite you to connect through a series of community-driven gatherings woven into our wider festival programme. These moments aim to nurture exchange, spark new collaborations, and reflect on shared practices within our extended network. From more informal get-togethers like networking drinks, to more focused sessions, our community meet-ups offer space to gather across disciplines and scenes. Whether you have been with us from the start or are new to the FIBER ecosystem, we welcome you to join us in celebrating, conversing, and imagining what’s next. Open to everyone!

Festival 10th Edition Birthday Party

  • Thursday 31 May - Bar San Francisco

  • 21:30 - 04:00

  • free entrance

Let’s raise a glass to a decade of wild ideas! To kick off our 10th festival edition, we want to celebrate together at Bar San Francisco. Join us for a night of dancing, to reconnect with familiar faces and meet new ones from our community. It does not matter whether you have been with us for all 10 festival editions or if this is your first one: come celebrate with us!

2025 marks ten editions of FIBER — a decade of building connections between the sonic, the digital, and the ecological. And while we are embracing a festival theme centered on Wildness, we are also reflecting on the chaotic beauty of what we have built together. This celebratory gathering brings our community together at the very start of the weekend: a time to toast the past, spark new collaborations, and re-enter a shared space with joy and curiosity. As the festival rewilds its own rhythms, we hope this evening invites a playful spirit and sets the tone for everything still to come.

Festival Community Drinks

  • Friday, 30 May - de Brakke Grond (Hallway / Café)

  • 16:00 - 17:30

  • free entrance

Meet the minds participating in this year’s festival. The Festival Community Drinks are an informal moment to connect with artists, curators, researchers, producers, and other peers attending the weekend. Hosted in the café of de Brakke Grond, this late-afternoon gathering is the perfect chance to bump into collaborators, share impressions from the programme, and spark conversations that stretch beyond the screen or sound system. Open to all, no RSVP needed — just show up.

Whether you've spent the day with us at the Context Program or just arrived for the evening, join us for a moment of pause and exchange before we continue with our Opening Keynote — a highlight that explores the festival theme and sets the tone for the wild days ahead. As we journey deeper into the festival’s wild terrain, we want to create grounding points for reflection, dialogue and connection. Whether you’ve been part of the FIBER story for years or are just tuning in, this is your chance to meet the wider constellation of thinkers and makers that animate our four-day festival.

Sound Art Drinks

  • Sunday, 1 June - de Brakke Grond (Hallway / Café)

  • 18:00 - 19:30

  • Free entrance

To wrap up the Sunday Sound Art programme, we invite sound artists, performers, curators and curious listeners to gather for a dedicated drink moment in the heart of de Brakke Grond. Anchored in a day filled with sonic experimentation and performance, this informal get-together is a chance to exchange thoughts, decompress, and connect with peers in the sound art field - a shared space for meeting other sound art practitioners.

Building on the new project Neighbouring Frequencies, which focuses on the presentation and exchange of sound art between the Netherlands and Belgium, we invite everyone working within sound art for these drinks; from creators, organisers and devotees of sound art. As sound art continues to grow in form, presence and relevance, we want to create dedicated occasions to connect artists and organisations, and support the long-term development of this vibrant scene.

Safeguarding Digital Festival Heritage (Invitation only)

A round table about festival archiving practices

  • Saturday, 31 May - de Brakke Grond (Bovenkamer)

  • 11:00 - 12:30

  • Closed session (invite only)

As part of the upcoming FIBER Festival 2025 happening May 29 till June 1 - we are hosting an expert session and public panel on safeguarding festival heritages in close collaboration with Alexander Scholz from HOLO Magazine. The expert session – organized as a round table – brings together both festival organisers, curators and researchers for a focused conversation on the topic of festival archiving. How do we safeguard our festival histories?

In an intimate setting, we’ll explore what it means to archive the history of festivals: From programme formats, exhibitions to (co)commissions. What do we keep, and how do we archive it? How do we document ephemeral practices, community stories, or experimental formats? And how might we imagine an archive that reflects the wild, shifting, and relational nature of our work?

As we celebrate 10 editions of FIBER and 15 years of the organisation, we would like to use this moment to pose these questions.. Rather than approaching archiving as a fixed process of collecting artefacts, we want to reframe it as an act of wild memory-making — one that allows for fragmentation, multiplicity and transformation. Grounded in this year’s theme of Wildness, the roundtable is a place to think collectively about archiving as a creative, critical and ecological practice. By inviting voices from our wider network, we aim to shape a shared vocabulary and plant the seeds for new strategies of documentation, preservation, and storytelling.

This is an invite only programme part. This programme is developed and presented in close collaboration with HOLO Magazine