COSMOTECHNICS: LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS IN FACT LIVERPOOL

Using plants as a guide, the exhibition invites audiences to explore the relationship between culture and technology through the works of four Latin American artists and collectives. Cosmotechnics includes existing works by Atractor Studio and Semantica, alongside new works by Patricia Domínguez and Rebeca Romero.

Zaidenberg envisions each installation within Cosmotechnics as a portal, where plants act as shapeshifters, allies, and mediators between the past, present, and future. Through these portals, visitors are encouraged to consider how plants can guide the development of technologies that reflect and respect diverse societies, ecologies, and cultures, drawing from the wisdom of local communities.

Atractor Studio and Semantica, Patricia Domínguez, and Rebeca Romero challenge the idea that technology is universal across all cultures. Their featured artworks, spanning sculpture, moving image, and sound, invite visitors 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.

For Cosmotechnics, Atractor Studio and Semantica present an award-winning sound and video installation. The sound piece A Tale of Two Seeds (2023) is exhibited alongside two video works, On Vegetal Politics (2022) and Botánica Transgénica (2022). Based in Colombia and the UK, both collectives of artists, biologists, and engineers create works to visualize natural events and scientific ideas. In this exhibition, 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. The artworks received the prestigious Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2023, the world’s longest-running media art competition.

Patricia Domínguez's artworks trace the digital and spiritual relationships between living species and how they are impacted by capitalism and environmental destruction. Born and based in Chile, Domínguez combines her research on plants, resource extraction, and healing practices to create sculptures, videos, and writings that imagine more sustainable and compassionate ways of living. In Cosmotechnics, Domínguez presents two works side by side for the first time: Tres Lunas más Abajo (Three Moons Below) (2024) and Matrix Vegetal (2022).

Born in Peru and based in London, 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, Romero presents Chrysalis (2024), a newly commissioned interactive sculpture that responds to human movement. This totem-like 'future-ancient device' is inspired by psychoactive plants and sacred ritual artefacts. In combining ancient wisdom with contemporary technologies, like video mapping and animation, the artist proposes a speculative alliance between plants and humans. Alongside, Romero presents 3D-printed futuristic artefacts and prints Codex I: Spring Equinox and Codex II: Winter Solstice (2024). Through these works, the artist asks audiences to consider what they might worship or hold sacred in a world yet to be born.