Curators: Jens HAUSER (DE/FR), Rasa ŠMITE and Raitis ŠMITS (RIXC, LV)

Un/Green exhibition artists: Agnes MEYER-BRANDIS (DE), Rebekah BLESING (US), Karine BONNEVAL (FR), Adam W. BROWN (US), Bureau d´études (FR), Santa FRANCE (LV), HeHe (FR/DE/UK), Robert HENGEVELD (CA), Florent Di Bartolo (FR), Voldem?rs JOHANSONS (LV), Iodine Dynamics (NL/FR/US/UK), Eva-Maria LOPEZ (DE/FR), Francisco LOPEZ (ES), AnneMarie MAES (BE), Joana MOLL (ES/DE), Quimera Rosa (ES/AR/FR), Jan-Peter E.R. SONNTAG (DE), Taavi SUISALU (EE), Rihards V?TOLS (LV)

The 2019 RIXC Festival aims at complicating the pervasively employed notion of “green” by providing a cross-disciplinary platform for discussions and artistic interventions exploring one of the most paradoxical and broadest topics of our times. The Festival features the “Un/Green” exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art, and the 4th Open Fields Conference which aims to ‘un-green' greenness, eco-systemically reconnect post-human postures, and discover and unpack ‘Naturally Artificial Intelligences.’

'Green’, symbolically associated with the ‘natural’ and employed to hyper-compensate for what humans have lost, will be addressed as the indeed most anthropocentric of all colours, in its inherent ambiguity between alleged naturalness and artificiality. Are we in control of ‘green’? Despite its broadly positive connotations ‘green’ incrementally serves the uncritical desire of fetishistic and techno-romantic naturalization in order to metaphorically hyper-compensate for material systemic biopolitics consisting of the increasing technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems, ecologies, and the biosphere at large. We, as human species, symbolically re-contextualize techno-scientific tools and their related metaphors to offset what we feel we are losing in times marked by the Anthropocene. Art at the threshold of the techno-sciences appears to be well suited to reveal the contradictions and paradoxes, and to disentangle allegedly linked notions such as ‘aliveness’, ‘naturalness, and’ ‘greenness’. Against the grain of the dominant colour symbolism, the “Un/Green” exhibition addresses ‘green’ as percept, medium, material biological agency, semantic construct and ideology. The media arts are well suited to critique and deconstruct the entanglement between the symbolic green, ontological greenness and performative greening. They stage its toxic ambivalence, perceptual shifts and multi-sensory alternatives to vision, trans-species encounters, technologized lawns, or the impact of digital technologies while we are greenwashing greenhouse effects away.

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