PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay
PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay is the 25th edition of the international festival of contemporary art practices Pixxelpoint, co-presented by the Nova Gorica Arts Centre and Aksioma – Institute of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana in the framework of GO! 2025 Nova Gorica European Capital of Culture.
Under the artistic direction of Janez Fakin Janša, the festival explores the potential of fiction to reconstitute a relationship with a world ravaged beyond repair through an international exhibition spread across four venues, an experimental discursive programme, an audiovisual and musical programme, a podcast series, commissioned writings and workshops.
What is the potential of liminal forms of subjectivity?
How can our narratives about the past, present and future be effectively reprogrammed?
Can intergenerational dialogue prevent the past from falling into ruin and enable the present to speculate on new visions of the future?
How can traditional, binary dichotomies, such as online/offline, past/present or virtual/real, be effectively addressed by a cultural event?
These are some of the crucial questions that PXXP•XXV addresses from its peculiar position of an event spread between two cities and states, growing on a former national and cultural border while effectively helping to shape the vision of a new, borderless Europe. In terms of format, these issues are addressed by developing a collaborative programme that merges generations, cultural contexts and social spaces, entrusting the curatorship of the various sections to a number of invited curators and relying on an extended network of participants.
This edition of the festival borrows its name from the main exhibition, Speculation and Decay, curated by Maja Burja, designed by Tamara Lašič Jurković and hosted by the Nova Gorica City Gallery, Agorè Gallery, Tir Gallery and Carinarnica, featuring a roster of ten artists and artist groups from five European countries. According to the curator, “the present moment is marked by a sense of loss, while the past, the present and the future are harder to unravel than ever. As imaginaries of what was once an open future turn into increasingly bleak prospects, the two main remaining forces in the world are steady decay and rampant speculation”. Re-appropriated and re-designed as creative processes, speculation and decay “become an opening for exploring alternative currents of the past, the present and the future, which embrace the ruptures, disruptions and unknown signs of the present moment in order to form a multiplicity of parallel worlds”.
The exhibition is accompanied by a hybrid, online/offline discursive and performative programme curated by Dominik Vrabič Dežman, Klara Debeljak, Maks Valenčič and Jan Kostanjevec, and produced in collaboration with THE VOID, a research project on tactical video and an audiovisual publishing venue for practice-based research led by Tommaso Campagna and Jordi Viader Guerrero at the Institute of Networked Cultures, Amsterdam.
THE VOID – which also delivers a student-oriented workshop – employs live streaming and dirty internet aesthetics to generate a hybrid space for conversation and collaboration, resisting the standardisation of mainstream media aesthetics. Two discursive events, exploring the transformative potential of spatial augmentation and temporal decay as well as the relationship between cultural production and available conditions of expression, are intertwined with a musical programme curated by Jaša Bužinel, which contributes to intergenerational openness of the festival by featuring emergent and established musicians with different musical languages and backgrounds.
The entire programme is closely followed by multidisciplinary artist Urša Rahne, whose photographic reports will be published on the “Vibes” section of the website, and Sonja Grdina, who interacts with and informs our online community in real time through various social channels.
The festival is preceded by a four-part workshop on game making and design led by Brin Žvan at the University of Nova Gorica in October that ends with a student exhibition; and is also extended in time and space by the new podcast series The Future Behind Us, conceived and conducted by blogger, art critic and curator Régine Debatty as a series of conversations with established international artists, focusing on issues of durability and obsolescence inherent to contemporary (media) arts. In the framework of an event where the participating artists and curators are generationally quite young, this aural project connects to a previous generation of artists, delivering their message on newness, time and decay through the liminal space of discontinuous listening.
Finally, the 25th Pixxelpoint festival is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Rok Kranjc and designed by Federico Antonini and Simone Cavallin, a time capsule in paper form that will hopefully preserve the project’s speculations beyond time and decay.