BXBI 2053
You are warmly invited to the Zine Release with an Artist Talk and Reading by Cassandra Troyan and Helga Steppan on Zoom, streamed from the future. (The event will be in English.)
BXBI 2053 is a self-published zine made in collaboration between Cassandra Troyan and Helga Steppan. The project stems from Steppan’s exhibition TREES GROWING BUGS (Or, can’t spot the wood for the tree.) shown earlier this autumn at Gallery Rostrum. In which Steppan showed artworks of her investigation of the tree species Pseudpinus telephoneyensis (Ring.) (a mobile phone mast disguised as a pine tree) and their integrated biological symbiosis with other species. Through explorative excursions in the UK, Steppan documents these fabricated trees and collects their fallen leaves, branches and needles.
The zine takes as its starting point the newsletters (1972-2014) for the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), where P. telephoneyensis (G. Bell) Ring, was spotted and investigated by members of the society as a new foreign species. Using this historical reference, Troyan imagines a dystopian surveillance future where the lives of these unique conifers begin to take over the forest in a complex web of relations between military drone technology, phone companies, forest genetics, and butterfly cloning.
In BXBI 2053, this speculative fiction begins a new collaborative project by questioning the prevalence of global surveillance technology and the role of human intervention and disruption of nature, where multinational communications companies finance the development of genetically modified surveillance plants and insects.
This project is carried out in collaboration with Galleri Rostrum with support by Kulturrådet and Malmö Stad.