From Dry to Wet Conceptualism in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2025 | Paris
hosted by Centre des Récollets and
Master in Arts & Vision (MAVI) of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University
September 1 – 6
Team
Founder/Director: Warren Neidich
Assistant Director: Sarrita Hunn
Resident Faculty & Global South Liaison: Syd Krochmalny
Coordinator of Integrative Art Studies: Elena Bajo
Video Documentation: Gabriele Stellbaum
Communications Strategist: Keturah Cummings
Warren Neidich is a text-based artist trained in fine art, architecture, and medicine whose work has been exhibited internationally including the Whitney Museum of Art, MOMA PS1 as well as the Venice Biennial. Recent awards include the Getty Research Institute Award, Hauptstadtkulturfond and Stiftung Kunstfond Neustart Kulture prizes in 2020. He is the founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2015-. He is editor of the three-volume collection the Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (2013, 2014, and 2017). The fourth edition of Neidich’s Glossary of Cognitive Activism was recently published by Eris Press, Athens.
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 the assistant director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2018-present) and have served as the artistic coordinator for the Wyvern Art Fund Scholarship Program (2024/25); co-founder/editor (with James McAnally) of MARCH, a journal of art & strategy (2020-25), as an expansion of their previous project Temporary Art Review (2011–2019); and co-curated (with Warren Neidich and Susanne Prinz) of Activist Neuroaesthetics, a festival of events celebrating the 25-year anniversary of artbrain.org (2021). Additionally, they are a founding member of Cypher Sex, a transfeminist collective focused on digital self-defense for sex-positive and queer communities; HIGH, a Berlin-based dark genderfuck techno ritual; and offline, a gathering space for activist culture and radical computing in Neukölln.
Syd Krochmalny is an artist, theorist, and writer whose practice merges critical theory, literature, and contemporary art through painting, installation, performance, and text. His work explores intersections of aesthetics, power, desire, and language, rooted in the symbolic economies of the Global South. His work has been presented at Museo Reina Sofía, Americas Society, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Parque de la Memoria, Harvard University, and the Guggenheim Museum. Editor of ramona and founder of revista CIA and revista Jennifer, he also served as Professor and Pedagogical Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas in Buenos Aires. He has lectured at Harvard University, New York University, and Columbia University. His literary work has been published by Caja Negra, Mansalva, and n direcciones. Krochmalny holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and completed postdoctoral research at Columbia University.
Elena Bajo is a Spanish-American artist, choreographer, and educator whose transdisciplinary practice fuses plant intelligence, ancestral knowledge, and technological experimentation through sculpture, performance, film, and AI collaborations. Their work redefines posthuman ecologies through “transcorporeal choreographies” positioning human, more-than-human, and machine intelligence as co-authors — exemplified by acclaimed plant-AI collaborative textiles featured at Manifesta 15. Trained across fine arts, pharmacology, architecture and Laban movement studies, Bajo’s practice bridges matrilineal Druid-Celtic heritage with technological innovation, creating “transmaterial dialogues” between human, botanical, and digital consciousness. She has exhibited, performed and lectured internationally including Manifesta 15, Performa Biennial NY, and Frieze London. Founder of S.L.A.B Project (Wonder Valley, CA) and Coordinator of Integrative Art Studies at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. Recipients of awards from LMCC, Neuestart Kunstfonds Berlin, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and Botín Foundation. Currently finalizing Freya’s Grove (Eternal Return) a speculative film and publication weaving her Celtic lineage with Germanic phyto-cosmologies.
Gabriele Stellbaum is a filmmaker, script writer and poet. Her work focuses on sociopolitical disorder and resulting traumas. In her films she drafts melancholic utopias where silent anxiety, confusion and psychological escapism melt into passive rebellion. Stellbaum’s films screen at festivals, galleries and museums and can be found in international collections.
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.