"What if materials could speak back? In this talk, I’ll share three curatorial journeys that reimagine how we think with and through matter.
Aikas Žado Laboratory: Crip Materialities draws on critical disability theory to question ableist assumptions in art, architecture, and conservation, highlighting practices that imagine more inclusive and intersectional futures.
Ethereal Robes of Vulnerability examines post-photographic practices through the lenses of material feminism and posthuman studies, rethinking how images, forms, and materials interact in fragile spaces between nature and technology, life and death.
Finally, Peripheria x Cor (PxC), a collaboration with designer Mantas Lesauskas, follows the stories of amber, stone, and wood to uncover how “peripheral” materials shape histories, ecologies, and futures.
Together, these projects propose curatorial frameworks that foreground embodied methodologies, decolonial strategies, and non-human perspectives, opening up new ways of thinking about matter, materiality, and their role in contemporary art and design."