October 16 – November 23, 2025, Riga, Latvia
Plant Intelligence. RIXC Art Science 2025 Festival
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Sporta iela 2
Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors. Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence, 2025. RIXC publicity photo.
Curated by Raitis Smits and Yvonne Volkart, the exhibition is a collaboration with the SNSF-funded research project “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” (2022–2025) (https://plants-intelligence.ch), asking from the perspective of art, whether the recognition of vegetal forms of intelligence might lead to other methods of knowledge generation, coexistence, breeding and ultimately to new, “intelligent” forms of plant and agricultural culture.
The exhibition’s conceptual context is based on the “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” theoretical framework proposed and developed by Swiss art theorist Yvonne Volkart:“Current research proves what ancient practices already knew: plants are more complex beings than previously assumed. With reference to this, the research project ‘Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant’ explores the discourse of plant intelligence in the natural sciences, the humanities and the arts. It negotiates the conceptualisation of intelligence and its interweaving with concepts such as mind, consciousness, communication, memory, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, subjectivity. It asks whether this conceptualisation makes sense of the behaviours of vegetal life and whether it promotes new perspectives on interspecies and terrestrial relationships.”
The exhibition opening will take place on October 16, 2025, at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre featuring 12 international artworks, 5 of which are the outcome of the Plants_Intelligence research. The exhibition will be open until November 23, 2025.