Festival keynote speakers (from the left): Noelia Billi, Jana Kukaine, Yvonne Volkart.

Opening Keynotes: Thursday, October 16, 2025, 15:30 – Noelia Billi (AR), Jana Kukaine (LV)
Symposium Keynote: Friday, October 17, 2025, 15:00 – Yvonne Volkart (CH), with Zheng Bo (CN)

This year’s festival presents outstanding keynotes from different regions – the Global South, the European North, Central Europe, and Asia, bringing together perspectives of vegetal agency, ecofeminist theories, critical ecologies, and socially engaged art from distinct contexts:

Noelia Billi (Argentina) is a philosopher and researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), whose work focuses on posthuman materialism, critical ecologies, and vegetal logics of existence. In her keynote Open-Air Laboratories: Plant Aesthetics, Ecological Maps, and the Politics of World-Making, Billi addresses the ambivalent figure of the “open-air laboratory” as a site where technoscientific experimentation, ecological processes, and political struggles intersect. Drawing on Argentine cases, Billi explores plants as ecological maps that mediate between biovigilance and capitalist extraction while enabling alliances for imagining more habitable worlds.

Jana Kukaine (Latvia), a leading feminist art theorist in Latvia, is senior researcher at Riga Stradiņš University and the author of Visceral Aesthetics: Affect and Feminist Art in Postsocialism (2024). Her keynote Plant Turn and Feral Feminisms will introduce concepts such as plant awareness disparity and the vegetal self, reflecting on risks of anthropomorphism and presenting her collaborative idea of “feral intimacy” (with Zita Kārkla), framing walking in the forest as a feminist act.

Yvonne Volkart (Switzerland) is an art and media theorist, lecturer and head of research at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN), Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, and principal investigator of the SNSF-funded research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022–2025), which in its current closing stage is the main partner in this year’s RIXC festival edition.

In her keynote talk, Plant Intelligence – Towards a Vegetal Aesthetics, Volkart will discuss her thesis and the foundations of her proposed Vegetal Theory, in which she argues: If we want to change the dominant lifestyle and begin to co-compose the world with plants, we must learn from them, think with them, and act with and through them. Also, in the arts. Her talk will continue in conversation with Zheng Bo, a Hong Kong–based artist (joining remotely) whose work is devoted to more-than-human vibrancy – investigating the past and imagining the future from the perspectives of marginalized communities and marginalized plants.

Keynotes

Opening Keynotes: October 16, 15:30 - Noelia Billi (AR), Jana Kukaine (LV)
Symposium Keynotes: October 17, 15:00 - Yvonne Volkart (CH), with Zheng Bo (CN)
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia, K2 building (entrance from the yard / park side)
Registration: via Eventbrite HERE

Organizers

RIXC Centre for New Media Culture
Festival Curators: Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits
Producer: Agnese Baranova (agnese@rixc.org)
PR and Information: Līva Siliņa (rixc@rixc.org, +371 25358541)
Symposium coordinator: Daina Siliņa (daina@rixc.org)
Producer assistant: Lelde Gūtmane 

Support and Partners

State Cultural Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, Pro Helvetia, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Goethe-Institut Riga, French Institute in Latvia, Franco-German Cultural Fund, Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture, LG Electronics, Sonic Sensory Lab, Department of Cultural Affairs – Taipei City Government, Zone Sound Creative (Taiwan), REVERIE Trading Group, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Art Academy of Latvia, NAIA – Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art Association (Germany), Maajaam (Estonia), Isop (Denmark), SENT (Norway), Lorna (Iceland), Institutio Media (Lithuania), Photinus Studio (Ukraine), SLOLab (Canada)

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Contacts

RIXC Center for New Media Culture / RIXC Gallery / Festival Information Center
Address: Lenču iela 2, Riga, LV-1010, Latvia
E-mail: rixc@rixc.org
www.rixc.org | festival2025.rixc.org
Phones:
+371 29635167 (Agnese Baranova, Festival Producer )
+371 25358541 (Līva Siliņa, PR and information coordinator)
+371 26546776 (office)