Exxxo: A Xenocommunity?
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EXXXO
This collection of texts is above all the outcome of a series of speculative exchanges between humans and non-humans, exploring the nature of alienation, its context and its emancipatory capacity. The links that these texts propose form a map of collective imagining that took place in a series of workshops under the title Exxxo. Exxxo is both a real and imagined place allowing the participants to hang out with and even befriend their aliens. Now you, as a reader, may be stimulated to confront your confusion regarding the strangeness of being as well.
We were inspired by the Xenofeminist manifesto written by the collective Laboria Cuboniks in which the power structures intrinsic to (bio)technologies invoke feelings of being in vertigo, lost, and, to put it mildly, alienated. To liberate oneself from this feeling, we propose to engage on a deep level, and maybe even to lose ourselves in Otherness, the unfamiliar and the non-human.
Exxxo researches identity destruction and new ways of living together by rethinking infrastructures and methods of care.
Exxxo aims to push the limits of the body in a speculative way.
Exxxo asks questions about our roles both as subject and as object by placing our bodies in front of the unknown.
Exxxo touches the familiar and the unfamiliar, blurs their boundaries, allowing friends and foe to coexist. In this experiment nothing is determined by any laws, not even those of nature.
Exxxo is about how any non-human element - including bacterial, viral and animal subjects - influence our knowledge of being a society. Considering that we are part of a network of human and non-human actors, we liberate ourselves by embracing their and also our own strangeness. Balancing between fiction and reality, the exchanges rethink the agencies of the parties involved.
