Artist and choreographer · 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Fine Arts
CURRENT
LAUREATE — PRIX SPÉCIAL HORS COMPÉTITION
FONDATION CARMIGNAC · PRIX COAL 2026
Artemisia Noctis: A Grammar of Darkness
Elena Bajo, Anarchoreography Nocturna, conceptual visualisation for Artemisia Noctis: A Grammar of Darkness, 2026.
Elena Bajo is the inaugural laureate of the Prix Spécial Hors Compétition – Fondation Carmignac, awarded within the Prix COAL 2026, whose seventeenth edition is dedicated to the night.
Exhibition: 4 December 2026–10 January 2027
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris
Manifesta 15
The Swamp Thing
news
2026 — Elena Bajo Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts
The Quantum Leaf Speaks in Ancient Tongues develops anarchoreographies—choreographic scores that operate as living an-archives. Through site- and non-site-responsive protocols, matrilineal Celtic plant knowledge, bodies, vegetal and mineral matter, and algorithms act as epistemic agents within what Bajo calls Relational Intelligence. Their signals, movements and material transformations accumulate in an evolving Quantum Phyto Codex: a transmaterial archive generated from the memories and materials each place already holds.
RECENT
SHIH: Thirteen Moons — Artemisia / Wallada — 2026, C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea, Córdoba. Curator: Jesús Alcaide. Artemisia, lunar time and Wallada’s obscured memory meet in a choreography that reopens botanical and cultural knowledge displaced from the official archive.
SPOIL — 2026, Marble House Project, Dorset, Vermont. Curator: Ed Morris. Quarry residue, marble and medicinal plants encounter one another as living archives of extraction and repair, bringing geological duration into contact with vegetal persistence.
NOW
Toma el presente: Colección Kells — 16 September 2026–17 January 2027, Centro de Arte Alcobendas, Madrid. Curator: Tiago de Abreu Pinto. Featuring Elena Bajo’s Cosmic Distress #12. Part of the Cosmic Distress series, the work approaches ecological crisis as a pressure moving through bodies, matter, atmosphere and economic systems—a disturbance that is both environmental and psychic.
UPCOMING
Sans Réserve — 4 December 2026–10 January 2027, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris. Presentation of the Prix COAL 2026 nominated projects, including Artemisia Noctis: A Grammar of Darkness.
UPCOMING 2027
La Nuit se lève — Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles, France. Presentation of Artemisia Noctis: A Grammar of Darkness. Dates to be announced.