CIVA Festival 2025 at Belvedere21 in Vienna
Photo of the Force Field performance by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
Credits to Joanna Pianka (eSeLat)
Civa – Contemporary Immersive Virtual Art - |indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus|
@ Belvedere 21 Museum
From October 2 – 4, 2025 I co-curated the Civa media art festival, which highlights the interplay between contemporary technologies, realities, and experiences across digital, physical, and hybrid spaces. This year’s festival and exhibition will focus on the realm of quanta.
More than a century of research in quantum physics has shown that the universe is neither deterministic nor entirely comprehensible or rational. At the microscopic level, matter behaves according to principles that defy classical logic: particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously, their properties emerge through interaction, and through entanglement, they can remain connected even across light years.
Quantum research has unsettled the long-standing distinctions between subject and object, perception and matter, and Self and Other. In a world shaped by ecological crises, technological disruptions, and epistemic ruptures, these insights also find resonance in contemporary art.
|indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus| brings together artistic positions that approach the indeterminate as an aesthetic, political, and speculative space. The artists engage with quantum concepts through poetic gestures, multi-layered embodied experiences, and playful abstraction. They explore the infrastructures of emerging quantum technologies and experiment with their creative potential. In doing so, they shed light on the frequently overlooked ecological and social implications that these technologies present while also negotiating their possibilities and inherent ambivalences.
The exhibition title, |indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus| draws on the bra-ket notation, a formalism used in quantum mechanics to describe states and their transformations. “Indeterminate” evokes the fundamental condition of quantum systems before measurement—a state of potentiality where nothing has been established yet. “Apparatus” refers not only to the measuring instrument but also to the complex constellation of the observer, the observed, and the conditions of their encounter. This apparatus extends beyond the laboratory to encompass the structures that define what qualifies as knowable and visible—institutions, bodies, discourses, and power relations.
|indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus| asks how a quantum worldview could take shape that embraces a grammar of non-binarity, allows for indeterminacy, and reconfigures the apparatuses through which reality is created. Here, indeterminacy is not viewed as a limitation of knowledge but rather as a fundamental prerequisite of reality. Instead of an either/or choice, it opens up the possibility of both/and.
Belvedere21 Museum Vienna
Festival: October 2 – 4, 2025
Exhibition: October 2, 2025 – February 1, 2026
Artists in the exhibition: Black Quantum Futurism, Alice Bucknell, Libby Heaney, Natalie Paneng, Mike Rijnierse
Festival director and curator: Eva Fischer
Assistant curator: Anna Ewa Dyrko
Co-curator and advisor: Ana Prendes (Arts at CERN)
Co-curators: Leon Lapa Pereira & Yannik Güldner (iii – instrument inventors initiative)
© 2024, Civa Festival 2025
CIVA Festival 2025 at Belvedere21 in Vienna
Photo of the Force Field performance by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
Credits to Joanna Pianka (eSeLat)
Aris Leon Lapa Pereira (he/him) is a cross-disciplinary performance researcher exploring the boundaries of performative life. Deeply embedded in the landscape of Artistic Research, his personal practice is consistently informed by philosophical inquiry. By merging mechanical and technical knowledge with performative elements, he engages with multiple disciplines with genuine enthusiasm.
Currently focused on the de-romanticisation of nature, Leon investigates the Rights of Nature—specifically, the rights of water—in collaboration with the Embassy of the North Sea. Through this partnership, he co-founded the Confluence of European Water Bodies, a growing network of activist organisations that support his research into intercultural relationships and intimate connections with water.
Alongside this, he is a curator at the Instrument Inventors Initiative (iii) and co-founder of the WASTELAND Festival, where he leads research and performance curation through an ecological lens. Co-creation and collaboration are not just professional principles for Leon, but also sociological commitments—central to his Resonant Bodies Residencies, where these concepts are deeply explored.
For Leon, co-living is a vital practice that is increasingly endangered by today’s polycrisis. He is, therefore, continually seeking methods and tools to cultivate honest, careful, and communal environments.
