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.
Opening Day: October 16, 2025
11:00 Press Conference and Tour
18:00 Festival Exhibition Opening
Program Highlights
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
Symposium
Day 1: October 17, 10:00–17:00. Plants Intelligence / Research Presentations and Artist Talks
Day 2: October 18, 10:00–17:00. Resonances of Nature / Symbiotic Cities
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia, K2
Registration: via Eventbrite HERE
Parallel Workshops
Resonances of Nature: Klimaton Workshop by Adnan Softić (DE)
Date: October 18, 15:00–18:00
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia, K2, Riga (Onsite only)
Registration: Please fill out the Google form to confirm your participation HERE
Symbiotic Futures: SensUs Art Platform Workshop / Baltic Nordic Extended Network Meeting
Date: October 18, 15:00–18:00
Venue: RIXC Gallery, Lenču iela 2, Riga / Online (Hybrid event)
Performances And Film Screenings
Resonances of Nature: Klimaton performances by Adnan Softić, Nina Softić (DE), Normal Babyy (Elza Auguste Zīverte & Kristofers Knesis) (LV) and Thies Mynther (DE)
Date: Friday, October 17, 18:00
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia, K2, Riga
Registration: via Eventbrite HERE (Onsite only)
Plants Intelligence: Film Screenings and Performances
Felipe Castelblanco “Borrachero Dreams” (2025, 12 min), “Inverted Oasis Part 1” (2025, 13:00 min), “Rio Arriba” (2021, 14:00 min), Julia Mensch “Kiwicha” (performance-lecture, 18 min) and Sofía Viola (AR) in cooperation with Julia Mensch (video-song, 5 min), Video Reporte por Ñambi Rimai Colectivo de Medios “Quemas de Páramo en el Pueblo Quillacinga” (2022, 11 min), and others
Date: Saturday, October 18, 20:00
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia, K2, Riga
Registration: via Eventbrite HERE (Onsite only)
Exhibitions
Exhibition and guided tours – as all other events this year – are free of charge.
For group tours, please send a request to rixc@rixc.org
Plants Intelligence: Exhibition
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)
Dates: October 17 – November 23, 2025
Venue: Kim? Contemporary Art Centre / Address: Sporta iela 2, Riga, Latvia
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 12:00–18:00
Transition Ecologies: Exhibition by Maija Demitere (LV)
Dates: September 5 – October 25, 2025
Venue: RIXC Gallery / Address: Lenču iela 2, Riga, Latvia
Working hours: Wednesday – Saturday: 12:00–18:00
Resonance of Nature: Installation Māja by Marylou Petot (FR)
Dates: October 16–18, 2025
Opening: October 16, 2025, 14:00–15:30
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia, K2 building, Riga, Latvia
Installation viewing times:
October 16, 2025, 14:00–15:30
October 17, 2025, 09:00–10:00 / 13:30–15:00 / 17:00-18:00
October 18, 2025, 09:00–10:00 / 14:00–15:00
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Organizers
RIXC Centre for New Media Culture
