Past event

Raise Your Voice Winter Camp

The 21st Century Alchemist

When: 14–17 November 2025
Where: Commons Hub, Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria
With: Baltan Laboratories

The winter camp participants on a white gravel riverbank below a rocky, wooded slope

A lecture in a wood-panelled room at Commons Hub, participants listening around a long table

Two participants in conversation by the river during the walk into the Höllental

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In November 2025 we travelled with the participants of Raise Your Voice to the Austrian Alps for a winter camp around alchemy. For four days, Commons Hub in Hirschwang an der Rax became the backdrop for lectures, walks, conversations and a lot of work on the participants' ideas and project proposals.

Raise Your Voice 2025

Raise Your Voice is a coaching programme by Baltan Laboratories for young artists, designers and researchers, developed with the alumni department of Design Academy Eindhoven. The Chimerical Intelligence Lab co-curated the content sessions of the 2025 edition, which ran from September to December 2025 with 13 participants.

Its theme was The 21st Century Alchemist: alchemy as a metaphor for a way of working, experimenting with what's possible, combining knowledge across fields and using imagination as a tool for discovery. The content sessions followed alchemical motifs:

Chrysopoeia and the Philosopher's Stone
Astrological Calendars
The Emerald Tablet
Panacea
a final session with the participants' project pitches

Alongside them ran practical sessions on project proposals, budgets, opportunities and positioning, individual coaching, and try-out sessions in Baltan's BlaBlaLab.

The winter camp

The winter camp was the programme's international exchange, set up as an unconference: an open space where the participants shaped much of the agenda themselves.

We began with a morning lecture and a walk into the Höllental, the gorge below the Rax. The rest of the days went into reviewing and presenting the participants' current ideas and project proposals, a conversation with Lukas, and time to compile and converge everything the group had gathered.

Fellowships

After the final pitches, three participants received a fellowship at Baltan Laboratories for 2026 to develop public programmes: Yi Zhang & Eshwari Ramsali, Mikolaj Stojanowicz, and Valerio Arsenio.

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