Power Lines

https://www.neme.org/projects/power-lines

Wind turbines disfigure the landscape. Solar panels are manufactured on the other side of the world. Hydropower plants fragment river habitats. Biogas is smelly. The list of grievances against renewable energy is almost as long as the ledger of virtues attributed to “green power.”
Renewable energy sources are repeatedly presented as a panacea for many of our climate, geopolitical and energy woes. Unlike fossil fuels, their widespread deployment across Europe promises stronger energy sovereignty, a (modest) mitigation of the effects of the climate breakdown and lower emissions of harmful air pollutants.

They are the best solution we have. They are not, however, a perfect one.

The energy transition has become a battleground for a polarised and often fruitless debate: between those who place their faith in a green technological progress, and those who view the enthusiasm for renewables as a convenient pretext to avoid scrutinising the organisation of our economies and our patterns of consumption. Perhaps the answer lies not at either extreme, but in the space between. We need both: a transition to greener energy and the reduction of our overall energy consumption; the renewable energy innovation and the political, economic and societal changes.

Power Lines brings together experimental and artistic works that examine the far-reaching impacts of the green energy transition on landscapes, communities and ways of living. The exhibition confronts the transition’s broken promises while also investigating what an energy future that respects our planet’s finite resources might look like.

Several artworks address the tension between green energy infrastructure and the local communities directly affected by wind turbines, geothermal plants, and other large-scale developments.

Other works in the show imagine what a radical, resolute and innovative future for sustainable energy might look like, proposing other ways of inhabiting the world and questioning our real needs and obsession with growth.

While the European Union pushes toward its long-term climate targets, the exhibition invites visitors to look beyond the policy headlines and confront uncomfortable questions. Who bears the true cost of the green transition? How can diverse ways of knowing shape its path forward? What sacrifices are we willing to make for low- or zero-emission energy? Must progress and climate protection remain at odds? And can history offer a blueprint for a sustainable future?

Seminars

Seminar 1

Régine Dabatty: Three tales of green colonialism

This talk will bring together three geographically distant territories—Extremadura (Spain), the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Sápmi (the traditional territory of the Sámi across the northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula)—to examine how forms of “green energy colonialism” are reshaping lands, soundscapes and communities. Through these three case studies, it will explore the territorial, political and social dynamics underlying renewable energy projects in contexts marked by dispossession and marginalisation.

Régine Debatty is a Belgian curator and art critic who lives in Turin, Italy. In 2004, she created we-make-money-not-art.com/ , a blog which has received numerous distinctions over the years, including two Webby awards and an honorary mention at the STARTS Prize, a competition launched by the European Commission to acknowledge “innovative projects at the interface of science, technology and art.”

Régine writes and lectures internationally about the way artists, hackers, and designers use science and technology as a medium for critical discussion. She created A.I.L. (Artists in Laboratories), a weekly program about the connections between art and science for Resonance104.4fm, London’s legendary art radio station (2012–14.) She has collaborated to numerous publications, most notably co-authoring the “sprint book” New Art/Science Affinities, published by Carnegie Mellon University (2011) and has co-authored the book E-Relevance – The Role of Arts and Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence for the Council of Europe (2022). She recently curated and hosted the podcast The Future Behind Us with Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana.

Nicolas Maigret (DISNOVATION.ORG): Dreamability Within Limits

Contemporary technological imaginaries are largely organised around expansion: more computation, automation, energy, extraction and growth. What happens if we instead imagine technological futures that begin with material limits, ecological dependencies, and finite planetary flows?

Through works such as The Solar Share, Eating the Sun, Shadow Growth and Life Support System, DISNOVATION.ORG explores ways of confronting abstract technological and economic narratives with their underlying material and energetic conditions.

Here, dreamability becomes not the imagination of unconstrained possibilities, but a way of orientating imagination and creativity towards different ways of organising needs, resources, and technology in pursuit of viable futures.

DISNOVATION.ORG is an artistic research collective founded in Paris in 2012. Its core members are Maria Roszkowska (PL), Nicolas Maigret (FR), and Baruch Gottlieb (CA/DE). Through installations, performances, publications and speculative prototypes, they make complex eco-social dynamics tangible and open to investigation. Their work explores energy, ecology, economics and technological imaginaries, challenging dominant techno-positivist ideologies and opening up possible futures beyond prevailing narratives of growth, extraction and innovation.

Marie Verdeil: Energy Academy

Artist and designer Marie Verdeil will introduce her practice at the crossroads of pedagogy and technology in an ecologically and politically threatened world.

She will present Energy Academy, her ongoing artistic pedagogy project in collaboration with Dasha Ilina, alongside various projects exploring the materiality and impact of digital technology and her work with the critical media outlet Low-tech Magazine. Verdeil aims to open a conversation on strategies for making energy tangible, critically examining the myths of the energy transition, creating alternative future imaginaries and outlining modes of action to resist the current top-down technological paradigm.

Marie Verdeil (she/her) is a French designer and artist based in Brussels. Her multidisciplinary projects—workshops, installations, publications, websites, tools—advocate for a critical, transparent, autonomous and environmentally aware approach to technology. She uses her creative toolset to open up the technological black boxes surrounding us, but also imagines desirable futures that are aligned with planetary limits.

Marie works closely with Low-tech Magazine, an alternative and techno-critical media. With Kris De Decker, they design low-tech prototypes, write DIY guides and facilitate workshops, inviting us to question our relationship with energy through practice, hacking and subversion.

Seminar 2

Leandros Savvides: From the abstract to the concrete city: Limassol, the Smart City imaginary, and the political unconscious of an imminent ecological crisis

Limassol’s ambition to become a “smart and climate-neutral city by 2030” stages, in miniature, the central contradiction of the global smart city imaginary: a discourse of frictionless, data-optimized urban futures that is constantly outrun by the concrete, sedimented ecological crises it claims to resolve. Promoted as a tax-friendly Mediterranean hub of algorithmic efficiency, smart mobility, and eco-efficient towers, the city’s digital veneer sits over a starkly different sociotechnical reality, simulating sustainability: a housing crisis that displaces local populations into peripheral and substandard housing; a labor market split between affluent tech and expatriate incomes and precarious local and migrant service work; extreme car dependency that renders smart sensors merely diagnostic of urban sprawl; construction runoff straining sewage and drainage systems; and a selective securitisation of public space that protects corporate enclaves while many parts of the city are left to deteriorate. The smart city here, therefore, appears not as an objective technical description of the city as it is, but as an abstract universal laid over (and obscuring) this concrete totality of dispossession, precarity, and ecological strain. How can we explain that there seem to be two separate cities, one glossy and one broken, sitting side by side? The smart city is not the polished version of the city but actually productive of the ecological strain, if one looks at the very accumulation paradigm that the narrative exists to sell.

The smart city, in this sense, is an abstraction that lives off the concrete conditions it disavows, and can only be understood by moving between the two rather than choosing one. Read as a socially symbolic narrative rather than a neutral plan, Limassol’s smart-city imaginary contains and manages this contradiction by translating them into technical problems awaiting technical fixes, naturalising itself as the only reasonable future on offer. Set alongside how such imaginaries are built, sold, and contested elsewhere internationally, and alongside the counter-mappings, site interventions, and audio-walks through which artists and activists already expose this friction on the ground, several counter-perspectives on Limassol’s urban future come into view. Among them, though not the only one, a case for a genuinely reduced, de-commodified relation to growth and consumption. At stake, ultimately, is who bears the true costs of a green transition sold as inevitable, and what it would take for a city to be honest about the myth it tells of itself.

Dr. Leandros Savvides is a sociologist of sociotechnical systems looking at the intersection of emerging digital infrastructure, critical political economy, and the changing landscape of media and journalism. His work examines how technological environments (from automated newsrooms to grassroots networks) are designed, institutionalised, and integrated into modern social and political life. Some of his recent research work explores how modern platform architectures and digital media spaces reframe, commodify, and distribute collective political memory and historical trauma.

Credits

Curator: Régine Debatty
Artists: Lisa Barnard, Disnovation.org, LOW←TECH MAGAZINE, Solar Protocol, Suohpanterror
Speakers: Régine Debatty, Nicolas Maigret, Leandros Savvides, Marie Verdeil

Programme

Exhibition opening:
8 October 2026; 17:00-21:00,
9 October 2026; 11:00-18:00,
10 October 2026; 11:00-18:00
Exhibition Duration: 13/10-8/11/2026
Opening days / times: Tuesday-Friday, 17:30-20:30
Seminar 1, Régine Debatty, Nicolas Maigret, Marie Verdeil: 11 October 2026; 19:00
Seminar 2, Leandros Savvides: 23 October 2026; 19:00

Funding

This project has been partially funded by the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Cyprus Deputy Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.