Staying Rooted

The Fields has grown into a flourishing community, where Wonderers from diverse backgrounds come together to exchange energy and creativity through shared experiences and curiosity. As we continue to evolve, we remain inspired by our land, ways of life, and the ancestral wisdom that have shaped our journey. In returning to our roots, we remember who we are and deepen our connection to where it all began, strengthening the foundation that allows us to thrive.

As Wonderfruit enters a new decade, Unconditional Space brings together artists and practitioners responding to the land, communities, stories, and histories they come from. Rooted in the tropics, they explore rebirth and origins, questioning inherited systems, listening to ancestral voices, and re-examining the ways history is understood. Through conversations, sonic workshops, durational gatherings, corporeal performances, and expanded cinema, they imagine new ways of learning, living and creating together.

Co-programmed with art curator Aaditya Sathish, this year's program, Tropicality: New Beginnings, explores tropical epistemology and perspectives that resist revising history. Not just a theme, New Beginnings is an attitude toward the landscapes, cultures, and lived realities of the tropics, embracing the plurality of histories and stories to imagine renewed ways forward.

Food reflects the landscapes, traditions, and communities that shape it. Celebrating the diversity of the region through locally sourced ingredients from Thailand and the surrounding landscapes, Culinary Culture explores how our relationships with the land and one another influence the way food is grown, prepared, preserved, and shared. Through recipes, ingredients, and culinary traditions passed down across generations, food becomes a living expression of culture, reciprocity, and togetherness.

Through ingredients, recipes, and the hands that prepare them, it reveals how culinary knowledge is shared across generations, preserving traditions while inspiring new conversations around the table.

This year, Open Kitchen unfolds across two open-air floors. On the ground floor, Life's Market, curated by Auntie Chan, celebrates hyper-local agriculture through five regional zones featuring onsite-grown ingredients, traditional foods, drinks, and hands-on workshops rooted in ancestral wisdom. 

Upstairs, Ma's Kitchen, presented by Lady GooGoo, welcomes Wonderers into an intimate Burmese home-style dining experience. Inspired by her grandmother's cookbook, guests leave their shoes at the door, gather on floor cushions, and share “Ah Myee” alongside stories that celebrate cross-border culinary traditions.

Wonder Kitchen brings people together around the table, where every meal becomes an opportunity for conversation, exchange, and discovery. Through chefs' tables, experiential dining, and intimate workshops, Wonderers connect with the chefs and wisdom keepers shaping our culinary culture, uncovering how ingredients, recipes, and food traditions continue to travel across generations, places, and cultures.

Across cultures, rituals and everyday practices have long helped people reconnect with themselves, one another, and the natural world. Rooted in Practice brings together movement, contemplation and communal rituals that cultivate presence. Drawing from traditions across Thailand and the region, these practices invite Wonderers to rediscover the wisdom that lives within the body, the land, and everyday life.

This year, the programming at Dhyana takes inspiration from Sahaja, a spiritual tradition that points to a state of natural simplicity and the ability for each of us to discover awakening, love, and compassion within the ordinary moments of everyday life. Through Sahaja, the path expresses itself in nature, physicality, and all aspects of our humanity, arising within everyday experience. Here, ordinary life, with all its contradictions, is recognised as already awakened, the highest expression of the non-dual.

Through ceremonies, movement, and the revival of Doha, songs of spiritual realisation, Wonderers are invited to slow down, cultivate presence and honour the elements. Together, these experiences shape Dhyana 2026 as a ceremony of awareness, where everyday experience becomes a path to awakening.

Curated by Black Turtle, whose work draws on authentic wisdom traditions to create contemplative, community-centred experiences that foster connection, perspective and resilience into our everyday lives.

Every community has customs that mark the rhythm of everyday life, with music woven throughout. From lullabies and songs sung during work and harvest to festive celebrations and sacred chants, each carries its own melodies and meanings. Passed down through generations, these sounds reflect the beliefs, values and stories that shape a shared cultural memory. Here, we explore these living traditions from different cultures alongside contemporary interpretations that allow their musical legacies to continue resonating in the present day.

Nature has always been our greatest teacher. Guided by the rhythms of the land, workshops, traditional knowledge, and hands-on experiences invite us to explore the wisdom of the living world. Along the way, Wonderers are encouraged to observe more closely, learn from nature, and deepen their relationship with the ecosystems that sustain village life.

Set within the Ancestral Forest, Medicinal Plant Village explores the living wisdom of traditional Thai medicine and contemporary healing practices. Through native herbs, workshops, conversations, and immersive experiences, Wonderers discover how generations of plant knowledge, folklore, and natural history continue to shape traditional healing practices, deepening our understanding of the enduring relationship between people, plants, and place.