In Cuba, where IT technology is scarce, creativity becomes a necessity. This exhibition illuminates Cuba’s culture of repair and digital improvisation. With limited access to technology and restricted internet, Cubans rely on ingenious, DIY solutions to stay connected and informed. Grassroots networks, like the vast offline data-sharing system “El Paquete,” deliver media, news, and software without the internet.
With installations ranging from offline servers to handcrafted Wi-Fi antennas, the exhibition reveals a unique digital culture born from exclusion. It poses critical questions about technological independence, asking whether innovation can thrive outside Big Tech’s control, and what we might learn from a society that does not depend on constant upgrades.

Based in fieldwork on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, Ephemeral Archipelago identifies and digitizes unique private archives held by people with a long living cultural heritage on St. Croix. The archive images serve as analytical starting points for in-depth discussions, providing empirical vantage points from which to re-conceptualize our understanding of the continuing legacy of the Danish colonial era in the everyday lives of those residing in areas affected by centuries of enslavement and colonial subjugation.

Memoria superimposes two narrative layers: the dystopian vision of William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic (1981), one of the earliest cyberpunk short stories, and the ethnographic reality of Cuba’s “offline internet”, the physical data distribution network El Paquete Semanal. The work appropriates Gibson’s fictional story of a data courier who has crucial information locked in his head and projects it onto the Cuban media reality with its informal networks and human infrastructures of data exchange and distribution.

Light Upon Light is a field trip into the mystical traditions of Islam, exploring people’s search for light at a time of darkness and political tension in post-revolutionary Egypt. Sonia sees light streaming into her heart from a person’s finger. Aya is lifted into a luminous space amid a ritual. Maher travels to the shrine of a holy man to find out if the light and love that people are referring to are real. Meanwhile the film crew, Muhammad, Amira, and Christian try to find out how they can film these experiences of light and how there can be so much light and darkness in this world and inside themselves.

Fragile Connections is the outcome of an artistic research project about SNET (Street Network), a vast grassroots computer network connecting tens of thousands of users across Cuba’s capital Havana. It replicates the technological setup of an SNET network node, serving as a fully functioning Local Area Network that allows audiences to explore parts of the network on their own devices and view or download research documents about SNET’s history. The installation also features a three-channel video documenting a focus group interview with three administrators, conducted over one of the network’s TeamSpeak servers and recorded on their desktop screens.

Paketown is a documentary mobile phone video game produced in collaboration with the Havana-based independent software studio ConWiro. It invites players to become entrepreneurs in the informal Cuban media sector. The game documents the island’s ubiquitous alternative data distribution network that spans the whole island and facilitates access to global media content such as pirated films, TV shows, music, software, or mobile phone applications.

Ikerasak is based on collaborative research into oral histories and vernacular archives in a small Greenlandic settlement. Part of the research project ‘Reframing History’, the exhibition unfolds in a 22-minute loop across 8 film-channels with an immersive 16-channel soundscape. juxtaposing analogue film footage with vernacular photographs and archival film footage, the installation collapses a century of everyday history in Ikerasak, investigating notions of place-making, belonging, and memory.

Platform is based on documentary interviews with gig workers from online delivery platforms, interweaving their experiences with references to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a visionary 1992 cyberpunk novel that has achieved the status of a Silicon Valley bible. The work delves into the extent to which the dystopian capitalist cyberpunk nightmare described in the novel aligns with the real capitalist nightmare in which we currently reside.

Descending with angels is an account of the invisible dynamics of possession and psychosis, and of how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients are shaped by the conflicting demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states.

Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients being treated in a Danish mosque and a psychiatric hospital. His analysis reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work not only to produce relief from pain but also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain. Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera, both the book and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to destabilize individual perceptions and experiences of agency, to allow patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God.

As part of the tripartite research project Revisited, photographs and film produced during fieldwork among indigenous groups in Central Australia, the Brazilian Amazon, and Eastern Siberia were juxtaposed with archival photographs originating between 1867 and 1914 in the exhibition Dialogues at Moesgaard Museum. The exhibition invited audiences to consider how cultural encounters unfold in time and reflect upon questions regarding representation and power through dialogues between ancestors and descendants across time and in space.

Ville Nomade is an illustrated monograph published in conjunction with the Prix HSBC, accompanying 7 exhibitions. It comprises excerpts from a growing urban archive consisting of material recorded, collected, and assembled as part of the ongoing research project ‘Tales of a Nomadic City’ that chronicles the history of the city of Nouakchott, capital city of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in Northwestern Africa. The long-term project integrates collaborative film-making, immersive VR experiences, soundscapes, and photography.

Soanin Killangit is determined to unite the people and attract international tourism through the revival of culture on Baluan Island, Manus, Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific. He organizes the largest cultural festival ever held on the island. But some traditional leaders argue that Baluan never had culture. Culture comes from the white man and is now destroying their old tradition. Others, however, take the festival as a welcome opportunity to revolt against ’70 years of cultural oppression’ by Christianity. A struggle to define the past, present and future of Baluan culture erupts to the sound of thundering log drum rhythms.

Manenberg is a 60-minute documentary about two young Cape Coloureds coming-of-age in a post-apartheid township outside Cape Town, South Africa. The film is part of the long-term research project ‘A Place Called Manenberg’ (Waltorp & Vium) about the coloured township Manenberg on the margins of post-apartheid South African society. Based on two decades of research, the project integrates multiple components ranging from photography and film, archive material, the inhabitants’ own photographs and diaries, and family photos, to maps, newspaper clippings, and scientific articles.