Sapieha Palace Symposium 2026

‘There are, melded into the isles, beautiful green waves of water and of silence.’ So begins Suzanne Césaire’s 1945 essay ‘The Great Camouflage’, published in Tropiques, the anti-colonial, anti-fascist literary journal she founded in 1941 in Vichy-controlled Martinique along with her husband, the poet and theorist of Negritude, Aimé Césaire, and the philosopher René Ménil. In Césaire’s essay, the ‘great camouflage’ is both binding and blinding, permeating the Caribbean Antilles. In her writing, looking is always also listening. That which is barely perceptible in the ‘Caribbean symphony’ can also crackle, crack and rip with the ‘sound of great manifestations’, while the teeming ‘heliconia shrubs and flowers of Absalon Forest’ resonate with the ‘disquieting ringing’ of the islanders’ dance.

In this presentation, I take Césaire’s poetic concatenation of visuality and aurality as a point of departure to consider the work of the Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla, whose sculptures, installations, performances and films often hinge upon recalibrating the relations between visible objects, acoustic phenomena and the particular materialities that inhere within them. Building from Césaire’s synaesthetic impulse, as well as phenomena such as rumour and glossolalia – both forms of ‘impossible speech’ –I trace a path across Allora & Calzadilla’s practice that reveals how sensory defamiliarisation can in turn catalyse processes of storytelling and oral transmission: a diversion, or trompe (trick), not simply of the l’oeil (eye), but also of the l’oreille (ear).

Can a score be a tool for difference, inherently oriented to the future and the speculation of future performance(s), diffractive futures? Moreover, what are the different stories it carries in its multiple iterations? Staying with one textual instructional performance score, Pauline Oliveros’ 1970 To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, this talk is foregrounded in my own multiple encounters with the work, to which I continue to return almost obsessively. These encounters, in turn, raise questions around the score’s unambiguous feminist politics, albeit one more inclined towards the ‘street’ than the ‘movement’, and that called me to research its accordingly multiple histories.

Here I recount an earlier series of encounters that swell outwards from the score itself — that foregrounds listening as the basis of performance and insists on the recognition of the individual as much as the importance of this group work — Oliveros’ encounters with Kathy Acker, Kate Millett and, in collusion with Jackson Mac Low, Gloria Steinem. Ultimately, I explore both the potential of such a score-based work as a vessel for telling wider histories and, in the specific case of this score, in its doing and becoming, tell a story of what might be termed an Oliverosian feminism.

In recent years, my practice has been defined by several dualities. As a writer, I have artistic ambitions and a penchant for poetry, while as a curator working in a national institution, I hold commitments: to history, to audiences, to practitioners. As a professional, I identify a problem and explore it by gathering information, drawing schematics, and reaching out to those who may know more than I do. And as a human with feelings, I usually have a sense where that problem may take me – the fact that I was drawn to it, like a bitch on a scent trail, probably means I know the answer. It is inscribed somewhere in the story I tell myself when no one else is listening.

Before that story is curated – fact-checked, tested against artworks, and made hospitable to others – it lies in something I call my heartbag: a pulsing pile of open questions and loose ends. When the scent trail becomes blindingly thick, I like to open the heartbag to others and hope that my weakness will work for our collective gain. At the moment, the heartbag contains political art practices by Lithuanian women and the history they may have written themselves out of; lullabies for hornets from nights when I could not sleep; looking for sculpture in all the wrong places; organisations I can neither found nor destroy; and something that will tie these threads into forty minutes that might bring us to the same scent trail.

Conventional discourses surrounding AI research and policy position explainability and transparency as the primary routes through which algorithmic systems become knowable and understandable. Yet such framings privilege rationalist modes of understanding while overshadowing the affective, embodied, and material encounters through which users apprehend AI in practice, alongside the modalities through which AI operations become affectively felt, sometimes without making themselves fully evident to the conscious mind.

This presentation rethinks understanding and explainability in and of AI through feminist and new materialist perspectives, proposing an emergent, process-oriented approach that foregrounds feeling, sensing, and being ‘in the midst’ of human–AI interaction. Drawing upon tangible and embodied interaction design and new materialist theories, I explore how materiality and embodiment operate as agents in the emergence of understanding and interaction. Contemporary heavily language-reliant models, together with emergent agentic AI systems that seek to infer users’ intent and not simply respond to commands, further politicise questions of interaction as intra-action, as well as the bodily-material apparatus of AI and its non/ethical operations. By troubling the disciplinary drive towards knowability and understanding and/as transparency, I argue that ethical interactions with AI would benefit from more embodied and material approaches, foregrounding material practices of care in design that expands AI evaluation beyond reason alone towards modes of affective encounter.

On the occasion of their first solo exhibition in Lithuania, artist duo Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter discuss their video installation Metrica No. 5. Filmed on location in the storerooms of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, the work unfolds through a score inviting professional psychotherapists to conduct intake sessions with the ‘collective psyches’ of administrative archives. Drawing on Lithuanian land and administrative records spanning the 12th to 20th centuries, as well as large language models and psychotherapeutic methods, these delegated performances explore the psychic ‘backend’ of Eastern and Western European bureaucratic technologies. In doing so, they test the boundaries of selfhood, consciousness, embodiment, healing, and collective memory.

We live in a world undergoing rapid technological and societal change: the informational current shapes physical objects and bodies, drowning everything in a solution of the real and the hallucinatory. In this new environment, the ancient technology of storytelling plays a special role: it governs the workings of the system even as it undergoes inevitable transformation itself. In her lecture performance, Agnieszka Polska uses cinematic found-footage materials as a backdrop for reflecting upon the Story – its role in shaping the emotional infrastructures of past and present, its evolution, and its uncanny ability to predict its own future.

Agnieszka Polska (b.1985, based in Berlin) is a visual artist and film director who uses computer-generated media to reflect upon the individual and their social responsibility within environments driven by the flow of information. Polska has presented her works at international venues, including the New Museum and MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organised by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Nottingham Contemporary; and Saltzburger Kunstverein, among others. She has also participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the 19th and 24th

Dr Goda Klumbytė is an interdisciplinary scholar working across human-computer interaction, algorithmic systems design, and critical theories. Her current research investigates feminist approaches to explainability in AI and machine learning at the University of Kassel, alongside new materialism in human–computer interaction at the University of Salzburg. Her previous work on the sociotechnical analysis of machine learning systems and interventions into their design through intersectional feminist and new materialist epistemologies received the Dissertation Prize 2024 of the German Sociological Association and will be published by Bristol University Press in 2026. Her recent books include Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices (with E. Jones and R. Braidotti, Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and More Posthuman Glossary (with R. Braidotti and E. Jones, Bloomsbury, 2022).

Irene Revell is a researcher, curator and serial collaborator with a long-standing commitment to multidisciplinary sound arts and their intersection with politics, especially feminism(s). She currently teaches on the MFA Curating programme at Goldsmiths and is a Senior Lecturer in Sound Research at CRiSAP, where she co-leads the Scoring Warnings research project. Stemming originally from DIY cultural production, much of her curatorial work over the past twenty years has been with Electra, and she is closely involved with collections including Electra’s Her Noise Archive and Cinenova: Feminist Film + Video. With Sarah Shin, she co-edited the anthology Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press, 2024).

Irene V. Small is Professor of Contemporary Art and Criticism in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her areas of interest include experimental practices of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, legacies of the avant-garde, abstraction, temporalities of art, problems of methodology and interpretation, relationality and the social implications of form. She is the author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and The Organic Line: Towards a Topology of Modernism (Zone Books, 2024). She has published on topics ranging from Neoconcretism and radical pedagogy to social sculpture, restitution debates, free speech and the afterlives of slavery. At Princeton, she is affiliated with the Program in Media and Modernity, the Program in Latin American Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Brazil Lab. She is a member of the advisory boards of the journals October and Texte zur Kunst.

Isabella Tjäder, Director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, has a curatorial practice rooted in language, listening, and the subversive potential of stories told well. Her work relies upon radical imagination and emotional attentiveness, inviting absurdity and embracing humour. She established the course Text as an Artistic Medium at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She has produced exhibitions and artworks in collaboration with Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MoMA PS1, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Secession, Vienna; Rhizome, Algiers; Overgaden, Copenhagen; Kunsthall Trondheim; and Manifesta 15, Barcelona.

Keiu Krikmann is a writer, translator, editor, and curator. Since 2021, she has been one of the editors of A Shade Colder, a magazine published by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA). Additionally, she also curates and teaches at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Working across video, installation, and performance, Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter stage encounters between industrial processes, professional grammars, and the human body – arranging what might be described as unlikely meetings between estranged landscapes. Through videos, performances, site-adapted sculptures, and drawings, they imagine scores for intercepting and redirecting infrastructural systems and bureaucratic processes. The duo’s work lodges materiality, voice, intimacy, and at times their own bodies, into the heart of technological, colonial, and extractive sites and processes.

Benedict and Rueter have exhibited work at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; The US Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; Msheireb Museums, Doha, Qatar; The Arts Club of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; P/////AKT, Amsterdam; and Contemporary Art Brussels, among others. They have received major grants from institutions including the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mondriaan Fund, the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their work has been reviewed by publications including Artforum, Revista, Agenda Magazine, and Hyperallergic. They recently published a book on their collaborative work with Daniel de Paula, deposition (2018–ongoing), with Mousse Publishing. They have participated in numerous international residencies, including Rupert, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Jan van Eyck Academie, Headlands Center for the Arts, and AIR Alexanderplatz. Benedict and Rueter currently live and work between Amsterdam and Berlin.

Monika Kalinauskaitė (Monika Kalin) is a writer and curator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her work has been featured in literary magazines, exhibitions, catalogues, and Lithuanian and international art publications. As a curator, she is currently working at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius, where she is investigating women’s contemporary art practices in Lithuania from the 2000s onwards.