The BWA Contemporary art gallery

Friday, June 26, 2026, 5:00 PM

We invite you to another meeting with Jo Vávra, dedicated to the experience of a para-institution that has been unfolding over five consecutive years on the Błędów Desert.

Jo Vávra is a cultural ecologist, curator, and ceremonialist. She is the co-founder and co-director of LIOS Labs, a non-profit organization creating experimental formats for artistic and ecological education—spaces for healing, emergence, collective learning, and mythopoetic inquiry into the land. Jo Vávra’s practice operates at the intersection of animism, cosmology, ritual, performance, and land art, drawing on knowledge gathered through listening, research, meditation, and continuous journeying.

Together with Jo Vávra, we will engage with the LIOS Labs archive as part of a shared process. The archive will subsequently be available for visitors in the exhibition space of the Aesthetic Congress.

You will also learn about this year’s Alcantara River School – 𝒶 𝓁𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓇𝒶𝓉𝑜𝓇𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝓈𝑒𝓃𝓈𝓊𝑜𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝑒𝓇𝒸𝑒𝓅𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃, a concept that emerged from practices developed on the Błędów Desert.

LIOS Labs is a community (formally an association) of artists, activists, and researchers from around the world. The group was formed in Berlin in 2019, inspired by the Błędów Desert in Poland—a place that became both the point of departure and the heart of its activities. Today, it functions as a network of so-called LIOS agents dispersed across the globe, connected through initiatives such as the LIOS Labs artist residencies on the Błędów Desert.

Focused on refining methodologies of collective learning and creating alongside ecosystems affected by desertification and ecocide, LIOS Labs combines art and ecology as practices of world-making in which regenerative ways of living can emerge. Through cohabitation, everyday collaboration, and improvised co-creation, participants seek to transform relationships between humans and more-than-human beings.

Its recurring practices have included the collective construction of a regenerative village, communal living guided by the rhythms of the elements, and cultivating relationships of exchange and care with the local ecosystem and community through artistic and educational activities in public space.

Over five years of activity, LIOS Labs residencies on the Błędów Desert have attracted artists interested in bringing their own practices into dialogue with the ecosystem of the Polish desert, as well as with the interdisciplinary entanglements of creative collaboration enabled by the residency’s experimental format. The practice of consciously sharing spaces for living and creating encouraged participants to prototype practices and tools for a better future in a time of overlapping global crises.

LIOS Labs artist residencies on the Błędów Desert have taken place every summer since 2020. Each edition emerged from a different curatorial concept, yet all shared a common foundation: the practice of coexisting with the desert ecosystem and following its rhythms. The residency structure was based on a natural system of life-sustaining forces and elements that shaped the daily choreography of activities:

water – transporting and managing water resources, caring for circulation and flow;

fire – gathering wood, maintaining fire for warmth and communal cooking;

wind – communication, movement, exchange, and the dissemination of ideas;

earth – working with materials, cooking, and creating organic artworks from locally found resources;

ether – the spiritual dimension, a time for collective reflection, meditation, and envisioning.

The residencies thus functioned as living experiments—places where life, artistic practice, and ecology intertwined into a single process, and where the rhythm of everyday life was inseparable from the rhythm of the elements.

The title of the meeting refers to the thematic series “Laboratory of Coexistence | COEXISTENCE LAB”, which, through immersive exploration of interdependence, focused on eco-social practices, storytelling, mythology-making, and language creation. Starting from a critique of the dualistic division of reality, it investigated nature-culture relationships as a way of becoming familiar with otherness. By uncovering unfamiliar perspectives and recognizing the beings that surround us, it undertook the challenge of restoring agency and subjectivity to ecosystems that contemporary culture often perceives as separate from ourselves.

Among the recurring practices of the “Desert Imagination Laboratory” were the collective construction of a regenerative village, communal living guided by the elements, and fostering relationships of exchange and care with the local ecosystem and community through artistic and educational activities in public space.

LIOS Labs functions as an open and adaptable structure. Its organizational team is formed around initiatives and collaborations proposed by residency participants. LIOS Labs was founded by Jo Vávra, and its leadership team has included Jo Vávra, Xtina Ariaz, Hannah Whitlow, and Jasmine Alakari.

More information:
https://jovavra.xyz
https://lios.io/projects

The event expands the “Futurological Congress” series within the framework of the “AESTHETIC CONGRESS” programme—a year-long series of exhibition and performative events aimed at rethinking and updating the institutional model of the art institution. The programme is developed through the engagement of diverse and complementary artistic languages and tools, as well as the participation of artists and curators.

Its primary point of reference and departure is BWA Katowice, an institution embedded in the urban and social fabric of the city as a historical instrument of social engineering. The modernist pavilion, now a protected architectural landmark, is the same age as the beginnings of the Polish wave of institutional critique. The need for its spatial and conceptual redefinition becomes the starting point for a broader discourse on the meanings and dynamics of the art institution understood in a universal sense. For the duration of the project, the main exhibition space will be transformed into a year-long laboratory of art. Historical works and newly commissioned projects will enter into dialogue, forming a collective space for reflection.

Curator of the “AESTHETIC CONGRESS” – Łukasz Trzciński