Luisa Cruz & Jan Munske 

Luisa Cruz & Jan Munske 

Luisa Cruz

Luisa Cruz is a researcher, filmmaker, and educator from Canada/Brazil, whose practice moves between documentary filmmaking, photography, and research‐creation. The trajectory of her work has led her to examine the ethics and poetics of belonging and participation in everyday life, exploring how small gestures reveal larger narratives about citizenship and collective imagination. Her experimental documentary projects, including Eclectic City (2019), Bkej (2024), and Circadian Verses (2022), have been shown in festival and gallery contexts such as Images Festival, imagineNATIVE, the Museum of Human Rights (Winnipeg, MB), and the Canadian Museum of Immigration (Halifax, NS). She is also engaged in community development through artistic practices, having facilitated grant writing clinics and participated in Mabelle Arts’ Newcomer Artist Training (2025).

Jan Munske

Born in Hamburg and currently based in Weimar, Jan Munske is a German artist who explores media environments that transform familiar objects into investigative tools, pushing the body toward its emotional limits. His work centers on dynamics of pressure and release, staging situations in which ordinary actions—such as drinking tea or screaming—become entangled with systems of bureaucracy and instruction. Working primarily with performance and installation, Munske creates immersive, often collective experiences where critical reflection meets humour and irony.

DXC Artwork Title: International Bureau of Honey 

The participatory performance, The International Bureau of Honey, collects thoughts, feelings, and opinions from attendees about our roles in current economic systems, in exchange for a small jar of honey – our currency for participation.

Artist Statement: 

Our culture is not shaped by culture; our culture is completely shaped by the powers of economics." — Joseph Beuys, 1985

The International Bureau of Honey is a participatory performance that makes use of the aesthetics and apparatuses of state bureaucracies, contrasted with the fluidity, sweetness, and symbolism of honey. Attendees––our clients––are invited to complete a short survey in exchange for a small jar of honey. However, every jar taken is replenished with the same volume of sugar water, gradually diluting its contents, and it is up to the attendee to decide whether they want to be given the honey sample or not. This procedure is borrowed from an ethical dilemma in beekeeping: it is a common practice to feed bees sugar water instead of honey, which is more cost-effective for the beekeeper, but nutritionally inadequate to the bees. Feeding sugar water to bees not only impacts their quality of life, but also the nutritional value of the honey they produce. Over the duration of the performance, as agents manipulate the honey and sugar water, use measuring tools, archive documents, and perform institutional labour, their hands run the risk of touching the honey itself, spreading its residues across the bureau. We see the possibility of this gesture as a way to make visible the effects that fall through the cracks in an institutional context. Joseph Beuys understood economics as a cultural and spiritual question, not merely a material one. We inherit that point of view, with honey representing warmth, transformation, and a form of organization that precedes and exceeds capitalism.

When is an arrangement reciprocal, and when is it extractive?

We are interested in the distinction between exchanges that sustain and exchanges that merely maintain appearances, and in how difficult it can be to tell them apart.

Instagram: @herrmunske @lupsc

DXC 2026 will open with Utopia Rewired: Creative Visions for Democratic Futures, a bold new exhibition spotlighting emerging artists from Canada and the European Union, on April 16. Presented in partnership with the European Union through its Delegation to Canada, the exhibition invites audiences to explore how art can reimagine democratic life—and the economic systems that shape it.