Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
Bérénice Gaça Courtin, FR
Confessional of the Unnamed, 2026. Jacquard weaving tapestry 400 × 500 cm.
Bérénice Gaça Courtin is a multimedia artist based between Geneva and Paris whose practice approaches textile as a post-industrial infrastructure shaped by technological control. Working across weaving, sound, moving image and performance, she investigates how bodies are rendered machinic. Her research draws on the history of cryptography and the legacy of her grandfather, Kazimierz Gaca, a member of the Polish resistance during World War II who worked with the ENIGMA machine. Tracing continuities between textile looms and cryptographic devices, she creates an industrial memory where technologies and displaced labor intersect. Combining ancestral with post-digital processes, her work uses textile as a space of opacity against extraction, through collective processes and collaboration.