Fact exhibition plants ideas around culture and technology

‘Transformative’ installations which use plants as a guide are at the heart of a new exhibition which opens at FACT this week.

The Wood Street venue’s 2024 Curator in Residence Beatrice Zaidenberg has curated the group exhibition Cosmotechnics which features the work of four Latin American artists or collectives.

Video, sound, sculpture and digital media come together to invite visitors to explore the relationship between culture and technology.

Atractor Studio and Semantica, Patricia Domínguez, and Rebeca Romero’s featured artworks aim to encourage people to reflect on their own understanding of technology, while exploring how local ways of thinking and sensing can lead to new ways of embracing art and culture.

Atractor Studio and Semantica, both collectives of artists, biologists and engineers, present award-winning sound piece A Tale of Two Seeds (2023) and video works On Vegetal Politics (2022) and Botánica Transgénica (2022).

Above: Atractor Studio and Semantica's installation at FACT. Top: Works by Rebeca Romero and Patricia Domínguez.

Their work highlights the social and ecological impacts of industrial agriculture in Colombia, using sound to convey the damage to soil and local communities, and underscore the significance of human and plant resistance to exploitative modern farming methods.

Chile-based Domínguez's artworks trace the digital and spiritual relationships between living

species and how they are impacted by capitalism and environmental destruction.

In Cosmotechnics, Domínguez presents film - Tres Lunas más Abajo (Three Moons Below) (2024) – developed during her dual residency between CERN in Switzerland and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, and Matrix Vegetal (2022).

Together the works reflect her ongoing exploration of the energy that connects all living things and objects on Earth.

Peru-born, London-based Rebeca Romero’s work blends pre-Columbian iconography with modern technology to ask how new technologies can revive ancient belief systems erased from history.

For Cosmotechnics, she presents Chrysalis (2024), a newly commissioned interactive sculpture that responds to human movement, and alongside that, 3D-printed futuristic artefacts and prints Codex I and II (2024). Through these works, Romero asks audiences to consider what they might worship or hold sacred in a world yet to be born.

Above: Works by Patricia Domínguez and Rebeca Romero in Cosmotechnics at FACT.

Zaidenberg says: “This exhibition stems from my ongoing exploration of how technology can foster the connection between us and our environment. Inspired by Yuk Hui’s concept of Cosmotechnics, it emphasises that technology’s true potential lies in its alignment with local cosmologies—spiritual, ecological, and cultural understandings of the world.

“My residency at FACT has allowed me to invite outstanding artists who showcase how technology evolves alongside these diverse knowledge systems.

“In each installation, technologies — ranging from machines to plants — become allies in prioritising collective well-being over linear progress, opening new possibilities for a more sustainable and collaborative future.”

Cosmotechnics is at FACT from November 8 to January 26.