“Plants Intelligence”: Symposium with exhibition of the HGK Basel research project in Riga

The RIXC Art Science Festival 2025 in Riga will present the HGK Basel research project “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” as part of a symposium and accompanying exhibition.

The 25th edition of the RIXC Art Science Festival, which will take place in Riga (Latvia) from October 16 to 18, 2025, is entitled “Plants Intelligence” and is dedicated to the research project on plant intelligence at the HGK Basel and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

The festival offers a diverse programme with a symposium and an exhibition that will be on display at the “Kim?” Center for Contemporary Art in Riga until November 23, 2025.

The keynote speeches at the symposium will be given by Argentine researcher Noelia Billi, Latvian art theorist Jana Kukaine, and Swiss art theorist Yvonne Volkart, head of the research project “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” and co-curator of the exhibition presented as part of the RIXC Art Science Festival.

The exhibition “Plants Intelligence” shows works by artists directly involved in the research project—Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite (with Raitis Smits)—together with indigenous artist Ayenan Quinchoa Juajibioy. They present the results of four years of collaboration with numerous partners and establish a South–North and East–West exchange of mutual learning about plants.

The exhibition is complemented by works by Ursula Biemann, Marc Lee, Zheng Bo, Karine Bonneval, Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick, and other artists who explore how underappreciated plant processes can be made aesthetically tangible, thereby generating new knowledge about plants within the framework of the concept of intelligence.

More information