I am an artist and writer living in Trondheim. Initially, I moved here for my PhD in artistic research at NTNU, which will conclude in Feb 2024. My art and research focus on future imaginaries that go beyond the dual culture of techno-optimism-collapsism. I work extensively with snails and other animals while contemplating the tripartite relationship between animals, humans, and technology.
My latest research seeks more explicitly to “reanimate the human” within an image, in order to more consciously track the ways in which our historical sense of human purpose (“species-being”) is being challenged by, and responding to, new ethological discoveries and a rather urgent new sense of ecological entanglement (not to mention mutual precarity).
In my work "Pending Xenophora" — a multi-layered world designed with a rout of garden snails — I’ve examined the possibility of pushing the emergent technologies of seeing (VR and AR) beyond an obsession with harvesting and translating individual perspectives, through embracing shared cultural intelligences and co-generative ideas between human, animal, and machine subjectivities.
In my work “Unwhorl,” I’ve developed a user interface that transforms any touchscreen device into an interactive plane for gastropods. My site-specific work "Terra Incognita" invites the viewer to walk in the virtual material crossover and is accompanied by a silent guardian who exists memetically in material and virtual form.
Prior to the shift to media ethology, I spent a decade cultivating an investigative visual practice that focused on the role visual culture played in maintaining global conflicts and crisis in status quo.
I’ve exhibited with Bonniers Konsthalle, Maison Populaire, Musée de l’Elysée, HKW Berlin, Art Souterrain, and Noorderlicht. My work has been published with Bloomsbury Press, Rutgers, EPFL Press, as well as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Courrier International, Le Monde, and e-flux, among others.
I’ve been an artist in residency at Academy of Architecture Amsterdam, Mediamatic, Chateau D’Oiron, Cité des Art, Mediamatic, and IASPIS, and held a research fellow position at Data and Society, EPFL, UvA, and Yale.
Links:
https://www.maribastashevski.com/pending-xenophora
https://unwhorl.com/
Social media for the project:
https://www.instagram.com/unwhorl/
https://twitter.com/unwhorl
Pending Xenophora
A multi-layered world designed together with a rout of garden snails in an aspirational gesture towards what Isabelle Stengers calls a “diplomatic intervention”; a panoramic monadology; an idea of knowledge evolving, dependent on shared agreements and perpetual re-negotiation between humans, animals, and technology.
