Programme 2026

For its 2026 edition, AMRO presents Becoming Unreadable at Splace, a showcase in which participating artists engage with strategies of invisibility, unreadability, and digital self-determination as critical responses to the hyper-visibility enforced by AI systems and the growing alliance between big tech and conservative politics.

Eleven international artistic positions address the ecological and social impacts of an extractive, profit-driven model of digitalisation, and illuminate the close entanglement of the climate and technology crises. Burnout not only settles in the individual body as a state of exhaustion, but it also accumulates, circulates and disperses into a shared climate that stretches across technical systems, social relations and ecological processes. What happens at the margins of exhaustion, where systems falter or refuse to fully cohere? Could spaces emerge for tentative forms of connection, alternative rhythms and practices that do not reproduce the extractive logic of burnout?

Welcome to AMRO26!

According to Jackson’s Rethinking Repair, breakdown, maintenance, and repair constitute crucial but vastly understudied sites or moments within the worlds of new media and technology today.

When light meets a dense surface it stops, and when a word meets a machine, it is rendered mute.

During the activation, visitors encounter a masked performer sitting among the plinths. Donning a ceremonial eyeless mask resembling the organs and wearing a biosensor on its heart, the creature seeks the visitors’ touch. As their hands meet, the organs transmit live sounds from the creature’s body into the visitor’s. As subtle hand contact unfolds a micro-choreography of closeness, their bodies merge in a poetic suspension.