LAACT extended (beyond light)

Announcement

Published 25 May 2026

A Speculative Research-Art Workshop, 8–10 October 2026, Wrocław

As part of the 80th anniversary of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław, an international edition of the research-art project LAACT extended (beyond light), entitled “Worlding”, will take place. The programme will combine artistic practices, theoretical reflection, and performative and field-based activities, creating a space for collective experimentation with new forms of knowledge, relationality and imagination.

About the Project

LAACT (Light as a Creative Tool) is an international artistic and research project that, for many years, has explored and critically engaged with the relationships between media art, theory, and reality. In this year’s edition, LAACT extended, we begin from the premise that the classical division between philosophical theory and artistic practice has reached its limits. Rather than thinking about images, we propose thinking through images, understood as material-discursive entities that do not merely represent ideas but actively produce and embody them.

The speculative workshops create a space to rethink collaboration between practitioners of theory and art in fundamentally different ways. Our aim is to bring together artists and theorists not only to disrupt this traditional division and encourage more experimental and hybrid forms of practice, but also to reconsider and investigate possible relationships between theory and art themselves.

The outcome of this collective inquiry will take the form of artistic and theoretical projects that expand the boundaries of our current understanding of reality. We seek to move beyond established ways of thinking about contemporary art, no longer treating art as an object that requires interpretation, but approaching it instead as a mode of thinking in itself, a way of engaging with realities that are only beginning to emerge.

Worlding is the process of re-establishing the metaphysical order of reality, not through exhausted language or anthropocentric norms, but through what Federico Campagna calls the ineffable: a sphere in which art, magic, and speculation open access to forms of reality that escape existing orders. It is a domain of privileged access for artistic, performative, and speculative practices, a space where a real transformation of the metaphysical ground of reality becomes possible.

Programme

The LAACT extended programme includes:

lectures and seminars,
artistic and research workshops,
field-based activities,
discussion and conversational sessions,
relational and collective practices,
networking and consultation activities.

The programme modules will be led by practitioners and researchers working across contemporary art, cultural theory, and curatorial practice, including:
Agnieszka Polkowska, Antoni Michnik, Paweł Preś, Basak Senova, Tymon Adamczewski, and Andrzej Marzec.

The curatorial and research framework of the programme is developed by Dr Andrzej Marzec and Dr hab. Robert Sochacki.

Project Locations

The project will take place across sites in Wrocław connected to the city’s modernist heritage, contemporary art, and its ecological and landscape context. The programme will include activities at:

the Four Domes Pavilion Museum of Contemporary Art,
the Lower Silesian Regional Chamber of Architects,
the Open Space of Culture,
the University of Wrocław student residence “Pancernik”,
the Astronomical Institute of the University of Wrocław,
Hotel Park,
and throughout Szczytnicki Park and the historic WUWA complex.

An important dimension of the project will be working with urban space, modernist architecture, natural environments, and more-than-human perspectives.

Open Call

LAACT extended is conceived as an open artistic and research programme. Individuals interested in participating are invited to submit a proposal for a project, action, or research area to be developed within the framework of the programme.

Participants will have the opportunity to: