Chus Martínez, chair of the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice jury, delivers the keynote lecture for VLC Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence. A writer, curator, and head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland, Martínez is the author of The Complex Answer: On Art as a Non-Binary Intelligence (2023), among many other titles. Drawing on the work of prize recipient Rosana Paulino and the Jane Lombard Fellows, ArTree Nepal, Stephanie Dinkins, Jason Edward Lewis, and Jenna Sutela, artists and practices she’s long championed for expanding conventional understandings of intelligence, Martínez reflects on the power of collective intelligence, an emergent awareness that transcends individual cognition.

Her lecture proposes art as an active “epistemological force”—a form of intelligence that both bridges and dissolves the conventional divide between human culture and natural, ecological, and artificial systems. In so doing, she considers how art generates new forms of perception, relation, and collective imagination that can respond to the intertwined social, technological, and planetary conditions of the present. 

Welcome remarks and conversation with VLC Curator and Programs Director, Eriola Pira.