Plants Intelligence: Exhibition

“Plants are our fellow travelers: humans completely live on them. Before the background of the current wasting of the world, we need to rethink other ways – vegetal ways – of worlding: ways that do not consume the world, but (re)produce it.”

— Yvonne Volkart

This year, Riga-based RIXC Center for New Media Culture celebrates its 25th anniversary. Since its founding, local collaboration and international networking have been at the heart of RIXC’s development. In this spirit, the 2025 festival is created together with key partners from Latvia, the Baltic-Nordic region, Europe, and world-wide.

Over the years, RIXC has gradually developed a discourse of techno-ecologies at the intersection of art, science, and technology, exploring topics such as renewable futures, ungreening greenness, ecodata, post-sensorium, crypto art and climate, and symbiotic realities. This year’s leading theme, Plants Intelligence, is shaped in close collaboration with RIXC’s distinguished partners — the Basel-based research team of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, which over the past four years has investigated how plant evolution and vegetal intelligence can inspire new methods, knowledge, and aesthetic approaches in both lifestyle change and the arts. Their research findings — spanning Indigenous knowledge and ethnobotany, critiques of extractive agriculture, experiments in organic breeding, and explorations of how plants sense, adapt, and relate to light and atmosphere — provide the theoretical basis for RIXC’s anniversary festival edition.

This year’s public keynotes will be delivered by Argentinian philosopher and researcher Noelia Billi, Latvian eco-feminist and art theorist Jana Kukaine, and Swiss art and media theorist Yvonne Volkart — proponent of vegetal theory and principal investigator of the Plants_Intelligence research project. Together, their voices trace South–North and East–West tangents of vegetal mutual learning, opening spaces for shared thought.

The main festival program will take place October 16–18, 2025, in Riga, featuring the opening of the Plants Intelligence exhibition at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and a symposium at the Art Academy of Latvia, with artist talks, research presentations, film screenings, and live performances. It will also present the Resonances of Nature project with a workshop, an interactive sound installation and performance, created through French, German, and Latvian collaborations. Further highlights include XR showcases by artists from the RIXC Field Residency, Taiwan-based Zone Sound, and Karlsruhe’s NAIA, along with the Symbiotic Futures Baltic–Nordic meeting.

The program is developed together with RIXC’s local, institutional, and international partners, each contributing unique perspectives to this anniversary edition.