From October 16 to 18, the RIXC Art and Science Festival and exhibition Plants Intelligence will take place in Riga and online! The festival will offer a wide-ranging public program with an exhibition opening, art presentations, performances, and short film screenings.
The central event of the festival – the exhibition Plants Intelligence – will open on Thursday, October 16, at 18:00 at the Kim? Contemporary Art Center in the SPORTA 2 quarter. The exhibition has been created in collaboration with the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded research project Plant Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022–2025). The exhibition will feature fourteen works by young and internationally recognized foreign and Latvian artists, in which plant intelligence is explored from the perspectives of science, art, indigenous peoples, anthropology, imagination, and speculation. The exhibition is curated by Yvonne Volkart and Raitis Šmits. The exhibition will be open to the public until November 23.
Plants Intelligence exhibition artists
In his work Detrás de la Noche (Behind the Night), Colombian artist Felipe Castelnuovo, who lives in Switzerland, explores the hidden life of plants after dark, revealing subtle, often invisible interactions between plants and other forest dwellers. Filmed with multispectral cameras deep in the Peruvian Amazon jungle, just below the equator, the film transports viewers into the shadowy world of plants – a world of ecological intimacy and botanical magic.
Hulya Menas’ work Field Drawings reflects the artist’s working process, in which drawing has become a tool for thinking and observing, slowing down time and intensifying the perception of the behavior of wild plants and their historical and political dynamics. The project highlights amaranth, a plant that is perceived as a weed and symbolizes ecological and political tensions in monoculture agriculture.
Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits in their work Solarceptors offer a virtual reality experience where 3D-scanned white lupines reveal the flowers’ reactions to light and their surroundings, revealing plants as light bodies that synchronize with the rhythms of nature. The artists’ second work, Light Sensing Experiment, complements this research by analyzing plant plasticity and decision-making processes using light spectrum filters and environmental data. Meanwhile, AI Herbarium was created using artificial intelligence trained with Andean lupine herbarium samples to visualize the evolutionary history of flowering plants and speculatively imagine the future development of species in response to anthropogenic climate change.
Swiss artist Ursula Biman’s work Forest Mind was created in the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, combining scientific and shamanic perspectives. Using poetic cinematic language, Biman explores the principles of world creation and new scientific approaches, combining digital and biological elements in a single strand of DNA.
The interactive work Speculative Evolution, created by Swiss artist Mark Lee, offers a glimpse into a future ecosystem enhanced by biotechnology and artificial intelligence. Viewers are invited to participate in the simulation and create new life forms, observing how their decisions interact with the unpredictable dynamics of the ecosystem.
The work The Sower by Latvian artists Gints Gabrāns and Arnis Rītups is designed as an artistic mystification. The work captures a global mission in which red mushroom spores are spread over Riga, London, Paris, and other cities around the world, raising questions about the interaction between humans and nature, the mutual influence of species, and symbolic symbiosis. Uģis Albiņš’s work Lucentula spina reveals the role and potential of plant fat materiality, combining its functionality with socially symbolic aesthetics, while reflecting on the relationship between technology, economics, and aesthetics.
Opening: October 16, 18.00–21.00
Venue: Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Sporta street 2, Riga
Exhibition Dates: October 17 – November 23, 2025
Exhibition artists: Uģis Albiņš (LV), Ursula Biemann (CH), Felipe Castelblanco (CO/CH), Karine Bonneval (FR), Gints Gabrāns, Arnis Rītups (LV), Kahn & Selesnick (FR/US), Julia Mensch (AR/CH), Marc Lee (CH), Ayënan Quinchoa Juajibioy (CO), Rasa Šmite, Raitis Šmits (LV), Zheng Bo (CN).
Curators: Yvonne Volkart (CH), Raitis Šmits (LV)
