Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits. Solarceptors, 2025. VR, still, courtesy of the artists

RIGA LAST THURSDAY
Thursday, October 30, 2025, 18:00-21:00

Visit the exhibition at the Riga Last Thursday program on October 30, 2025 from 18:00 until 21:00!

Plants Intelligence Exhibition

Opening: Thursday, October 16, 2025, 18:00
On view until: November 23, 2025
Venue: Kim? Contemporary Art Center 

The Plants Intelligence exhibition at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga is conceptually and thematically developed in cooperation with the SNSF-funded research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022–2025), and features its outcomes. The exhibition also includes other works in which artists explore the intelligence of plants through scientific, artistic, indigenous, anthropological, imaginative, and speculative perspectives.

Artists: Uģis Albiņš (LV), Ursula Biemann (CH), Felipe Castelblanco (CO/CH), Karine Bonneval (FR), Gints Gabrāns, Arnis Rītups (LV), Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick (FR/US), Julia Mensch (AR/CH), Marc Lee (CH), Ayënan Quinchoa Juajibioy (CO), Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits (LV), Zheng Bo (CN).
Curators: Yvonne Volkart (CH), Raitis Smits (LV)

Plants Intelligence

Suggesting that current research shows plants to be more complex beings than previously assumed, this year’s RIXC festival theme is developed in collaboration with Yvonne Volkart and her team’s four-year research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant of the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which negotiates the discourse of plant intelligence across the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts. The four-year research project explored the notion of intelligence and its intertwining with mind, consciousness, communication, memory, decision-making, learning, and subjectivity, asking whether such conceptualizations make sense of vegetal life and whether they promote new perspectives on interspecies and terrestrial relationships.

To explore these questions, the Plants_Intelligence team — including art theorist Yvonne Volkart as principal investigator, and artists Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite — collaborated with partners in botany, plant ecology, seed and plant breeding, organic agriculture, food sovereignty, and Indigenous nations. While Argentina has circulated genetically modified seeds on a large scale since the 1990s, Switzerland has uniquely enshrined the dignity of the creature in its genetic engineering law. Drawing on laboratory experiments with plant decision-making, Indigenous plant–human alliances, and GMO-critical practices in South America, the team elaborates the im/possibilities of vegetal intelligence:

Felipe Castelblanco’s Plant Movements explores how plants communicate knowledge through medicine and agroecological models in the Andean-Amazon, where vegetal and human communities form alliances to sustain life and resist ecological threats. Julia Mensch’s Amaranth as Political Agent examines Argentina’s transgenic agriculture as a continuation of colonial terricide, highlighting Amaranth’s ecological agency as both a challenge to GM crops and a form of vegetal resistance. Rasa Smite’s Flower as Antenna and Attractor includes collaborations with Swiss breeding scientists at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and explores how flowering plants sense and interpret light, resulting in a VR visualization created together with Raitis Smits.

Analyzing diverse artistic research case studies at the crossroads of vegetal knowledge across South–North and East–West regions, Yvonne Volkart develops Vegetal Theory, proposing that underestimated vegetal processes can be aesthetically experienced, generating genuinely new knowledge about plants through the concept of intelligence.

More info on Plants_Intelligence Research Project: https://plants-intelligence.ch/

More about the festival: https://festival2025.rixc.org/

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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)