Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić
Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić, a fellow Serbian academic and artist, she roots the tuber in communion and kinship across species. Drawing on the urgency of Serbia’s student protests, she reimagines the “potato state,” once a pejorative echo of “banana republics,” as a space of empowerment and possibility. She presents, What Can a Potato Foretell Us About Ourselves?, part of her ongoing research project Multispecies Storytelling of Our (Be)Comings. Conceived as a communal, performative experience, the work gathers participants at a shared table where savoring, sewing, stitching, and storytelling become acts of intimacy and inquiry. Together they ask: What can a potato teach us about endurance, collaboration, and togetherness? What ideas can we plant today to compost knowledge and nurture practices for surviving planetary crisis? Through dialogue, textual fragments, body movements, and savory bites the piece transforms polyphony into a living fabric, opening a rhizomatic space of meaning-making.
Sunčica Pasuljević Kandić is a Serbian antidisciplinary practitioner who explores the intertwined relational threads between nature, technology, and society, focusing on their interdependence and impact. Her works, such as EcoSomatic Protocols of Kinship (2024, EU project Bio Awakening) and Ancestral AI: Shifting Knowledge Paradigms (2023, The Digital Green Society, SHARE Foundation), employ her methodology of soma-linguistic choreographies. These choreographies activate somatic listening and movement, awakening us to our embodied and ancestral knowledge. Through this approach, she aims to foster "technologies of the self" as countermeasures to the effects of prevailing A(I)nthropocentric ways of being.
Her participatory and collaborative works, including Decompression Lowcast: A Light Footprint in the Cosmos (School for the Contemporary Arts & David Lam Centre, Canada, with Daria Medić, 2022), AI/VI (Art & Science Program of the Center for the Promotion of Science—Ars Electronica, Linz, with the AI/VI team, 2020), and Trashscape (Oulu August Festival, Finland, as part of the Translation Flowers collective, 2020), create spaces for conversation, (un)learning, caring, and sharing between living and non-living species.
With over a decade of experience as a cultural worker (Institute for Flexible Cultures and Technologies - Napon, Interkultivator) and as an educator (teaching at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Department of New Art Media), she continues to blend pedagogical and curatorial practices, supporting hybrid approaches that reframe art education and making.
