Strange Adaptions — Exhibition

It was never just a shelter but an act of power and separation — Architecture. It carved out space, and as time went on, we withdrew deeper and deeper into it. From its inside, we came to understand ourselves as rational, cultured and civilised — free minds standing in contrast to the chaotic wildness we’ve left behind, an outside to manage, to tame, utilise or look at from behind the glass.

But what if these walls, these boundaries, weren’t as solid as we thought? What if the inside and the outside were never truly separate at all? What if architecture were a mechanism suppressing an awareness of our connections to the exterior — the chalk in our bones, bacteria in our gut, iron in our blood, amino acids in our cells?

Slip into an alien sensorium, forge new metabolic alliances with mealworms, turn plastic into proteins, and drink the desert fog. These are the gestures of Inxects's architecture — strange models and metaphors for living, evolutionary adaptations to unpredictable ecologies, and tools that allow us to forge new connections with the strangeness of our present condition and the latent possibilities within it: learn from the odd morphologies of cacti, from the shiny shells of desert beetles, and from the audio-sonar of a bat! This is not an architecture of separations but of relations.

Inxects' architectures invite us to interrogate the nature of our dilemmas and pose new questions by preserving aspects of the very issues they propose to fix: The heroic narrative, the tech-fix allure, gadget culture, the incessant drumbeat of individualism, and the ephemeral chase for the fashionable.

They are not mere solutions or tools for the smooth functioning of an idyllic future but ambivalent artefacts that deny the relief of utopian purity, total solutions, and fantasies of wiping the slate clean. They are architectures that call humanity into the open, where a new awareness may leave behind the boundaries of the inside and the outside.

Inxects

Inxects is a design practice closing the gap between humans and the rest of nature through design and technology. The studio was founded by the acclaimed Swedish architect Pavels Hedström in 2021.

Credits

Inxects Team

Pavels Hedström, Letitia Gordon, Milan Flicek, Asibi Ayagiba, Mikkel Ulriksen, Jacob Schill, Mai Sakamoto, Kaspars Liepins, Miz Deshannon, Ramaz Kiknadze, Oliver Sundqvist.

CAFx Team

Josephine Michau, Pernille Maria Bärnheim, Søren Nørkjær Bang, Ida Willadsen Bang Kjeldsen, Valeria Granillo, Janosh Heydorn, Nina Margania.

The Exhibition Project is Supported by

Statens Kunstfond, Realdania, the Municipality of Copenhagen.

Opening Hours and Admission

The window exhibition can be experienced 24/7, free of charge.

If you want to know more about the exhibition, you are welcome to drop by our space at Halmtorvet 27. It is open to the public every Thursday from 13:00 to 17:00, granting access to in-depth content related to the exhibition, such as sketches of projects by Inxects and an interview with Pavels Hedström. It is possible to have a curatorial tour by appointment or during event dates. Admission to the space is 30 DKK; it is free for members of CAFx Community.