The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity,
and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2024 | Paris
in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme
September 30 – October 5
Team
Founder/Director: Warren Neidich
Assistant Director: Sarrita Hunn
Resident Faculty: Sophie Kovel
Integrative Art Studies Coordinator: Elena Bajo
Communications Strategist: Keturah Cummings
Warren Neidich is an artist and theorist who gathers together methods of poiesis and pataphysics to generate text-based, conceptual art works of illuminated neon glass that manifest as politically-motivated, conceptual and diagrammatic constellations in collision with painting, video and photography. Fundamental to his practice is thinking through the mind and brain as a resource for artistic production. He is the founding director of the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art and currently contributing editor at BOMB Magazine and 02. See full bio.
Sarrita Hunn is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, curator, and web developer whose often collaborative practice focuses on the socially and politically transformative potential of cultural activity. They are a co-founder/editor of MARCH, a journal of art & strategy and assistant director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. Additionally, they are a founding member of Cypher Sex, an queer feminist collective focused on digital self-defense for sex-positive and queer communities in Berlin and beyond, and offline, a gathering space for activist culture and radical computing in Neukölln.
Sophie Kovel is an artist and writer whose work examines the economic, social, aesthetic, and ideological operations of ethnonationalism. Selected exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; VERY Project Space, Berlin; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York; University of California, Los Angeles; Petrine, Paris; and NEON, Athens. Their interviews, projects, and criticism have been published in Artforum, BOMB, F Magazine, Frieze, Spike, Jeu de Paume Magazine, and elsewhere. Kovel was a 2022–2023 studio fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and works between Paris and New York.
Elena Bajo is a Spanish-American artist, educator, and founder of the S-LAB Project. Using Celtic ancestral methods and a trans-disciplinary art practice which combines sculpture, film, and performance, they mine vibrant plant systems to discover their unique material forms and activate new forms of consciousness. They are currently exhibiting in Manifesta Biennial 15, Barcelona. They received an MFA from Central Saint Martins (London, UK) and an MA in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ UIC (Barcelona, ES), Laban and Bartenieff Movement at TanzFabrik, Berlin Contemporary Dance Center.
Keturah Cummings works with plant-based materials to critically examine and participate in constructed narratives about the “natural” world. Her photographs and videos situate the feminized body, porous and leaky, in relationship with the landscape, shattering notions of a separate and “pure” nature. A research-based practice has brought her to disparate forests as an artist-in-residence at Tropenstation La Gamba in Costa Rica and Arteles in Finland, among others. She also co-founded Nightmare City, which has been written about in Artforum and Modern Painters.