presentation: Mari Bastashevski

Pending Xenophora

by Mari Bastashevski & human and other than human partners

8 Jul 2022

Pending Xenophora is 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. On Friday 8th of July, we are hosting the kick-off of Mari Bastashevski's work period in the Sluisdeurenloods.

Enlarge

Mari Bastashevski. Garden snails, 2022. - Mari Bastashevski

Unsorted; Problems; Miscellaneous; 

These are some of the ways of being out of order at the London Natural History Museum. Other categories of the uncategorised include to be incorporated when space allows and pending xenophora.

Some of the drawers to which these beings are consigned have not been opened in two hundred years. Mollusca, once the subject of Victorian fad, are now so low on the hierarchy of priorities, they would have been disposed of long ago but for the tiny inscriptions with dates and the name of their collector.

Many of these creatures are either already extinct, or will have gone extinct within the 25 years it will take to sort them into a museum category. They are, like all of us, suspended between states of knowledge and oblivion.

This work was brought to life in collaboration with: 

Unwhorl Collective (the snails)
Mattia Pretolani (architect)
Jordan Sand (composer)
T. Craig Sinclair (architect)
Int Studio 
In conversation, always, with Clemens Driessen

Kick-off Work Period

Mari Bastashevski: Pending Xenophora
Friday 8th of July, 17:30 - 19:00
Mediamatic | Dijksgracht 6
1019 BS Amsterdam