THEME EXHIBITION AT ARS ELECTRONICA

EVERYBODY SHOULD BE A FARMER

agosto 28, 2025

TOWNHALL MEETING

octubre 1, 2025

Published by Quo Artis at septiembre 30, 2025

PANIC: COMPLEX. ABSURD. OMINOUS.

On view from 3 to 7 September, 2025

ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL - POSTCITY - Linz (Austria)

ABOUT

At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 in Linz, the four artists selected through the Tilling Roots and Seeds residency and production grant — Santiago Morilla (ES), Mali Weil (IT), Emma Harris (DK), and Fara Peluso (DE/IT) — present their works within the Theme Exhibition PANIC: Complex. Absurd. Ominous, curated by Manuela Naveau.

Addressing biodiversity, interspecies relations, and speculative food futures, their projects are showcased as part of the festival’s most attended edition, which gathered 1,472 participants from 87 countries and welcomed 122,000 visitors across 19 venues.

Emma Harris – Plant Exposures (2025)

Plant Exposures responds to biodiversity loss and soil depletion caused by industrial agriculture by exploring the relationships between soil, plants, and humans.

Using low-toxicity analog film and plant-based photographic processes, Harris reimagines agricultural landscapes through the lens of coexistence, positioning overlooked weeds as collaborators and indicators of soil health. Plants and microbes are invited into the image-making process itself, their chemical and temporal traces shaping the final images.

Embracing unpredictability, the work asks how interspecies collaboration can reshape our understanding of agriculture, opening new ways of perceiving life-forms that often remain invisible to human perception.

Developed during her residency at Arvaia CSA in Bologna (Italy), the project draws directly on the practices and ecologies of a community-supported agricultural cooperative.

Santiago Morilla – Ritual Device for Fungal Humus. (2025)

Ritual Device for Fungal Humus begins from the proposition that "everyone should be a musician, a dancer, and a fungus farmer at the same time". The project explores what the interaction with, and care of, healthy soil means for the future of agri-food systems, recognizing fungi as vital indicators of biodiversity and interspecies collaboration in metabolic processes.

The installation presents a garden device designed for the cultivation and biosonification of saprophytic fungi. As the fungi grow, their blooming is translated into sound, generating a shifting soundscape. At the same time, the audience’s movements and touch on the wood floor panels are captured through contact microphones embedded in them, and these signals are integrated with the fungal sonifications to produce the resulting composition.

The project was developed through site-specific fieldwork across urban and peri-urban agricultural initiatives in Catalonia, including the Green For Good community gardens of the Ferrer Sustainability Foundation, Contorno Urbano in L’Hospitalet del Llobregat, the hydroponic installations of Tectum Garden, and the vegetable gardens of Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera–Món Sant Benet and the Alícia Foundation. These encounters fostered dialogue with local caretakers and farmers, grounding the work in lived ecological and cultural dynamics.

Mali Weil – Rituals | The Mountain of Advanced Dreams (2025)

Rituals | The Mountain of Advanced Dreams is a research-based art project by the Italian collective Mali Weil, critically focused on Interspecies Diplomacies—ways of reimagining our relationships with other living and non-living beings, as well as the territories we inhabit.

The work combines philosophical, scientific, and speculative approaches with narrative and world-building strategies, developing fictional spaces that bridge past and future, theory and practice, human and more-than-human.

At its core is the two-channel video Rituals, composed of three ceremonial acts exploring body, language, devouring, death, and dreams, presented alongside the film The Mountain of Advanced Dreams.

Mali Weil continued their research on Interspecies Diplomacies during a Tilling Roots & Seeds residency at Il Poggiolo – Rifugio Resistente (Italy), where their artistic practice intertwined with the farm’s landscape and the life of its surrounding community.

Fara Peluso – Synthenesis (2025).

Selected through the Tilling Roots & Seeds Production Grant, Synthenesis imagines a near-future scenario in which individuals cultivate Spirulina algae as part of everyday life.
At the heart of the installation is a hybrid organ—part human, part non-human—that synthesizes edible pearls of Spirulina through a biochemical spherification process. Spirulina liquid is encapsulated in a gel membrane of sodium alginate and calcium chloride, producing flexible nutrient pearls that can be consumed to support both physical and mental health.

Combining DIY biology with soft robotics, glassblowing, and bioplastic membranes, the work envisions how living machines might enter our homes and rituals, transforming food production into an intimate, embodied practice. Beyond proposing alternative nutrient sources, Synthenesis raises questions of care, decision-making, and empowerment: How might such machines shape future societies, and how can they reframe the relationship between humans, technology, and planetary health?