HIGHLIGHTED #4 – Art on Tezos at NFC Summit, Lisbon
4–6 June 2025
Last week, the Non-Fungible Conference took place across Lisbon’s Pavilhão Carlos Lopes and its surrounding spaces. As with previous years, the event functioned as a convergence point for web3-adjacent creators and platforms. Art on Tezos was present throughout a series of overlapping initiatives — including a container gallery, large-scale public works, screenings, curated group pieces, and informal gatherings. Not grouped under one single banner, these moments instead formed a decentralised constellation of artistic interventions across the three-day program, representative of the diversity and creativity found in the community on Tezos.
Echoes of Light – immersive container curation by XCOLLABZ
Among the more materially striking contributions was Echoes of Light, a curated exhibition by XCOLLABZ housed in a modified shipping container. The installation began on the outside, with two large-scale murals covering the container walls by artists OMGiDRAWEDit and Sutu. Not just serving as decorative façades, these graphic compositions acted almost like portals: immediate and confrontational. OMGiDRAWEDit’s mural extended his irreverent visual language — one of absurd humour and visual overstimulation — while Sutu’s layered psychedelia hinted at dream logic rendered in pixels. Both included AR animations and made you curious for more.
Inside, a continuous projection of works by 25 artists filled the narrow space. The absence of objecthood — no physical prints, no framed screens — allowed the projections to function less as individual pieces and more like an ambient ecosystem. The exhibition explored “The exhibition explores the ephemeral nature of light, its ability to transform environments, and its profound impact on our perception”. The format deliberately flattened hierarchy: there was no “main” artist. The gallery asked viewers to surrender the expectation of authorial priority or narrative progression, and instead to dwell within an experience of accumulation and sensory drift.
The container became a vessel not for showcasing art, but for staging a perceptual mode and a sensory experience.
![Singing Stones [Downweather Of The Invisible Sun] by Somfay](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6714f0ff1f9d464782852d8a/1749498661844-6HMGQRY7UWVXZWPLDL14/Lisboa-198.jpg)
Sum by Víctor Doval – a screening without climax
Elsewhere on the main stage, Víctor Doval presented a screening of Sum, a project that has been in quiet development for over three years. Built as a generative work derived from contributions by 28 artists, Sum is less a finished product than an evolving logic system. It resists traditional exhibition formats, which made its appearance on the main stage a curious contradiction — generative work is typically experienced privately, ambiently, or in code-based environments. Here it was temporarily fixed, paused for observation.
That suspension is part of what made the piece conceptually rich. It foregrounded the tension between code’s potential for endless variation and the audience’s need for resolution. Sum offered neither narrative nor conclusion. Instead, it moved like a weather system — image systems mutating in slow cycles, visual motifs returning like refrains, never quite identical.
In its most essential form, Sum models a kind of collective authorship rarely attempted in generative practice. The work’s structure disperses agency, dilutes authorship, and repositions the artist not as creator, but as facilitator of emergence. The project will be released via objkt.one at the end of June.
NFTs Are Not Dead – Grida’s counter-gesture
On another axis, Grida curated the group collage NFTs Are Not Dead — a chaotic, layered digital composite featuring 30 artists available as an open edition on Infinite Ink. The title itself reads as provocation, or maybe sarcasm, aimed at the repeated declarations of the NFT market’s cultural or economic demise. But the curation doesn’t defend NFTs in the traditional sense. Instead, it parodies their legacy and exposes their contradictions.
Stylistically, the selection pulls from recognisable imagery created by each artist, coming together as meme culture, countercultural aesthetics, and internet-era détournement. The result is deliberately unruly — a resistance to the polished, luxury aesthetics that once dominated early NFT marketplaces. What’s striking is the refusal to isolate. There’s no focal point, no hero image, no clear frame. In that way, NFTs Are Not Dead functions as a structural critique of the art market's tendency to individualise value.
If Sum was a slow meditation on interdependence, NFTs Are Not Dead was its unruly sibling — fast and loud: here we are.
NFTs Are Not Dead
Peripheral signals – booths and brunch
Outside the curated projects, art on Tezos was present in more incidental forms. V. Ruins’s booth, featuring Dark Tales, offered an interactive experience: visitors were invited to produce their own investigation report by conversing with the fictional character Cormac Delaney. Ruins’ work demonstrates the artist’s commitment to narrative-building.
La Poste, the French postal service, returned to NFC to showcase its digital stamps, powered by the Tezos blockchain. This appearance quietly pointed to a broader infrastructural use of blockchains and the willingness of traditional institutions to adopt new technology.
Finally, the BruchByFidel Lisbon 2025, co-sponsored by Objkt, was a lovely art brunch. Fidel created an informal space for physical gathering — an break from the exhibition circuits and panel-heavy programming. These soft moments often reveal more than the main events: casual conversations, introductions without agendas, and recurring reminders that for many artists in this space, community is not a metaphor but a method of working.
Dark Tales interactive booth a NFC Lisbon. Image courtesy of Vandalo Ruins.
Diversity, not dominance
There was no single, dominating narrative to the Tezos presence at NFC Lisbon, and that was precisely the point. Instead of a singular keynote or major announcement, Art on Tezos offered a mosaic of expressions: some bold and immediate, others subtle and enduring. It was a multi-layered showcase of creativity and collaboration.
From Sum to Echoes of Light, NFTs Are Not Dead to Dark Tales, each project spoke in its own voice, yet all shared a common ethos; one that values connection over spectacle, and community over hierarchy.
Together, these moments formed a powerful statement: that within the Tezos ecosystem thrives a vibrant diversity of approaches, perspectives, and talent.