Taking place on Saturday, 9 May 2026, in the iconic In Paradiso Restaurant in the Giardini della Biennale in Venice, the daytime event will feature a performance by acclaimed Austrian artist Doris Uhlich and a discussion between philosopher and author Paul B. Preciado, the head of tranzit.at Georg Schöllhammer, and Tereza Stejskalová, the director of tranzit.cz. The event celebrates the publication of the anthology tranzit 20+, which chronicles the first two decades of the tranzit.org network of initiatives in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Cluj, Iași, Bucharest, and Bratislava.

Paul B. Preciado will speak with Tereza Stejskalová and Georg Schöllhammer about the urgencies of the present—about bodies, institutions, and the conditions under which knowledge and freedom can still be produced.

Doris Uhlich will present »La/goo/n«, a performance in which bodily boundaries become fluid, opening associative spaces for other forms of living. Moving between fascination and discomfort, empathy and abjection, the work invites audiences to navigate freely through a shifting field of sculptural, landscape-like, and processual intensities.

Set within the dense public sphere of the biennale, the event proposes a temporary space of attention and exchange—an echo chamber for practices that have long unfolded at the margins. Between discourse and embodiment, reflection and gesture, it connects local struggles with broader global conditions shaped by reactionary turns, exclusion, and renewed forms of control, while opening toward possible futures grounded in solidarity.

Doris Uhlich is a Vienna-based choreographer and performer. In her productions, she often questions conventional formats and body images, works with people with diverse biographies and corporeal inscriptions, explores the potential of nudity beyond eroticization and provocation, examines the relationship between humans and machines in a multifaceted way, and grapples with the future of the human body in the age of its surgical and genetic enhancement.

Paul B. Preciado is the author of An Apartment on Uranus, Counter-Sexual Manifesto, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics, and Pornotopia, for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France. He was the head of research at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) and the director of its Independent Studies Program (PEI) from 2011 to 2014. From 2014 to 2017 he was the curator of public programs of documenta 14.

Georg Schöllhammer is an editor, writer, and curator based in Vienna. He is the founding editor of springerin and head of tranzit.at. Schöllhammer has worked internationally on projects like documenta 12, Manifesta 8, the Venice Biennale, the Gyumri Biennial, The School of Kyiv, Sweet Sixties, L’internationale, Former West, and the Vienna Fair, and he initiated Office Ukraine. He is the founder of the Július Koller Society.

Tereza Stejskalová is a curator and researcher based in Prague, Czech Republic. She is the director of tranzit.cz and a cofounder of the Biennale Matter of Art. Between 2018 and 2022 she worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In 2017 she initiated the Feminist Art Institution, a coalition of cultural institutions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia united by a code of practice.

Program
12:30 Doors open
13:00 tranzit 20+ book launch
13:15 Paul B. Preciado in conversation with Tereza Stejskalová and Georg Schöllhammer
14:00 La/goo/n – A performance by Doris Uhlich
14:30 Doors close

Admission to the event is free of charge, and capacity is limited.

Marking twenty years since its inception, tranzit.org reflects a sustained commitment to situated knowledge production and independent cultural work across central and eastern Europe: small-scale, self-organized structures resisting nationalist closure, supporting critical artistic production, and building transnational alliances through care, knowledge-sharing, and long-term collaboration. The anniversary is not a retrospective but an invitation to continue.

The series of tranzit 20+ book launch events will continue throughout 2026 in Budapest (29 April), Prague (12 June), Bratislava (16 October), Cluj, Bucharest, Iași (22-27 July), and Vienna (4 December).

For more detailed information please visit: tranzit.cz / lecture & discussion / more-than-20-years-tranzit-org-paul-b-preciado-doris-uhlich

Header image: In Paradiso Restaurant, Castello, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia (c) Venice News