“Emergent. A post-pandemic mobile gallery” presented by Buiani, Briede and

This project emerges form a series of reflections about the state and the potentials of the arts and their exhibition spaces in post-pandemic times. The pandemic of 2020-21 forced many galleries and museums to shut their doors for several months or forever. These closures have created a void in social gatherings and cultural events, urging artists and cultural workers to rethink ways of making, exhibiting and bringing their work to the general public. Now that the world slowly re-opens to social gatherings, we wonder whether we should re-invent the role of the gallery as an enclosed space alltogether, by freeing it from the constraints posed by its traditional spatial and cultural configuration (real and virtual),and redesigning it as a multipurpose mobile object in dialogue with the city and its human and non-human dwellers. This choice is in part inspired by the first artworks and specimens this gallery will carry: a project at the intersection of art and science exploring “new life forms,” that is, living and imagined organisms emerging from digital, laboratory, and environmental contexts. The mobile gallery then acquires a new meaning: it is not just a new safe exhibition space, but also a space where emergent life is both debated and created, as well as an emergent “life” on its own.