Thematic - 2026 Edition
In an age saturated with deepfakes, disinformation and algorithmic opacity, the boundaries between truth and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred. The next edition of the Symposium will explore the aesthetics and politics of camouflage, obfuscation and strategic deception as critical and survival tactics in an era marked by post-truth. Far from reducing disinformation to a strictly digital issue, the event will situate camouflage within a broader genealogy—military, ecological, colonial and psychological—where it reveals itself to be both a tool of domination and a vector of resistance.
The next edition of the Symposium will examine the multiple dimensions of camouflage: material, symbolic and affective. Some works may highlight the way in which bodies, identities and subjectivities are concealed, controlled or instrumentalized by means of visual manipulation—whether through surveillance systems, political rhetoric or filters that shape our interactions on social media. Others may employ mimicry, concealment or narrative instability to thwart the mechanisms by which information is produced and circulated. Through these approaches, camouflage will appear not only as a mode of escape, but also as a critical lever capable of revealing the invisible structures that make deception possible.
Combining installations, moving images, performances, painting and sculpture, the event will foreground artists’ singular ability to navigate—and complicate—the visual economies of our post-truth condition. By working from the basis of ambiguity, illusion and distortion, these practices will reject the simplistic division between true and false in order to better examine what is at stake in the ways in which we perceive, believe and interpret.
Rather than a simple symbol of misinformation, camouflage here becomes instead an aesthetic and political strategy in its own right: a tool capable of masking, reflecting and subverting the dominant narratives that shape our perception of reality. The public will be invited to rethink the systems of perception and persuasion that govern our daily lives, and to consider the role of art as a force for disruption, revelation and resistance.
