The newly developed three-channel video installation Valley of the Heart’s Delight (2025) performs a shift from the planetary to the local and situated. The title references the historical name of the once fertile land, now known as Silicon Valley. Captured through the lens of an industrial robotic arm, layers of soil and crushed white shells evoke the sacred shellmounds of the Indigenous Ohlone people: Burial grounds and remnants of ancestral life that now lie hidden beneath corporate headquarters. Behind the smooth façades of technocratic ideologies, the installation reveals the ongoing erasure of marginalized voices and cultures.

Soft Image, Brittle Grounds prompts reflection on the entangled relations of technology, ecology, and inequality, raising the question of who has access to information, who holds interpretive authority, and whose histories are displaced by dominant narratives of progress.

With Soft Image, Brittle Grounds, Felix Lenz represented Austria at the 24th Triennale Milano International Exhibition, commissioned by the MAK and funded by the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport. Entitled Inequalities, this Triennale focused on the growing social, economic, and ecological disparities which are further aggravated by the climate crisis and rapid technological developments.

Artistic Concept and Realization
Felix Lenz

Curator
Marlies Wirth, Curator, Digital Culture and MAK Design Collection

Graphic Design
Lisa Penz, David Gallo

The exhibition is the MAK’s contribution to the 2026 Klima Biennale Wien.