Critical Media Lab Basel and Swissnex explore energy futures through artistic exchange in Brazil

As part of a collaboration between Swissnex in Brazil and the Critical Media Lab Basel, artist-researchers Cristina Cochior and Guillemette Legrand will visit Brazil for a series of exchanges with artists, researchers, and cultural institutions. The visit aims to strengthen dialogue between Swiss and Brazilian creative and research communities while exploring how artistic research can contribute to conversations on the energy transition, digital infrastructures, and the ways climate futures are imagined and represented.

During their time in Brazil, Cochior and Legrand will meet with local artists, researchers, and institutions to exchange perspectives and explore common questions across disciplines and geographies.

Cristina Cochior is a researcher and designer whose work focuses on knowledge organization systems, situated software, experimental publishing, community-managed digital spaces, transfeminist approaches to technology, and alternative digital infrastructures. She is a member of the Rotterdam-based collective Varia and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Her doctoral research is part of Infrastructural Rehearsals: Creative Responses to the Green and Digital Transition.

Guillemette Legrand is an artist and researcher whose practice centres on documenting and intervening with the imaginaries of computational infrastructures. Guillemette’s current research explores the capacity of climate modelling practices to objectify Earth into world(s); a constructed cultural, political and social organisation of Earth and its future. Her artistic work has been presented at institutions including Victoria and Albert Museum, ZKM, LUMA, Van Abbemuseum, and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media.

This research was funded in whole or in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), through the research projects Infrastructural Rehearsals: Creative Responses to the Green and Digital Transition (10000691) and Climate Cosmograms: Mobilising Climate-Imaging Practices in Search of New Earth Imaginaries (2225131), both situated at CML and the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at HGK Basel.

Their visit takes place during two weeks of Swissnex activities focused on energy transition, running in parallel with dedicated agendas for Swiss startups and researchers, creating opportunities for exchange and future collaborations with Brazilian institutional partners.