Artists Statement

Outland Exhibition April 7-23, Plateforme Paris

Supreme is a symbiotic world on the back of a World Beast: a host life-form of lingering mycorrhizal thought; a projection of the mythic imaginary; at once a looking glass at our present interconnected ontology and a proposition for a radical reimagining of a symbiotic future.

The oneiric universe of Supreme is home to a number of different non-human Critters which interact with each other and with the world itself. Their worldview consists of a series of myths about the workings of their universe.

All non-human entities in this virtual universe interact using a animistic neural network system to give them life as an emergent property of the network. It is a virtual living symbiotic ecosystem which plays out as an infinitely unfolding animated story.

This project is a journey through future animism, the symbiotic-real, storytelling, shapeshifting and mythic imagination. These themes are intertwined with ecology and extra-human relationships: the roots of our research on Slow Thinking.

Supreme is also host being for tentacular writings by several authors and artists who wrote texts from a shared starting point: Symbiosis and interdependence. These writings are integrated in fractured form within the piece as artefacts scattered on the back of the beast.

Our writing collaborators for this piece were: Serafín Álvarez (artist, Barcelona), Paul Robertson (professor – Cognitive Science of Religion, University of New Hampshire), Corinna Dean (Expanded Territories Research Group, University of Westminster), Phoebe Wagner (writer and editor of Sunvault), Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (artist, member of EVOL), Sofia Gallarate (VVAA collective).

In 2022, we wrote an article about Slow Thinking based on the explorations of Supreme for the CCCBLab: https://lab.cccb.org/en/slow-thinking
https://xenoangel.com

• Marija Avramovic & Sam Twidale (Xenoangel) live and work in Paris, France. Xenoangel explores new relationships between humans and non-humans. Our practice is based on notions of world-building and our work crosses disciplines ranging from painting and physical installation to writing, music and real-time animation. Marija has a masters degree in painting from Belgrade (2013), and a second masters in fine art from ENSBA, Paris (2017). Sam has a music degree from the University of Liverpool and is a self-taught game-engine programmer. https://xenoangel.com