XENO is an installation featuring a chimeric plant hybrid made up of mechanical and animal parts. The hybrid draws energy from silts and mosquitoes that feed on human blood, challenging our understanding of natural energy, and reframing it as a precious exchange between living bodies, rather than a value-free resource. Natural energy involves constant negotiation between living organisms, which operate through metabolism. In its simplest form, metabolism can be thought of as a continuous transfer of electrons between different bodies.
However, in the modern world, energy has been reduced to a commodity, lacking inherent complexity. Industrial society's use of fossil fuels transforms long-deceased organic matter into seemingly limitless power, elevating humans to quasi-divine status by animating machines. This process, however, has severely depleted natural resources, endangering our future. XENO's complex energy exchange both animates the plant and implicates us in the ethical dilemmas and processes of (re)vitalization of an "alien" energy ecosystem.
XENO takes center stage at the CIVA museum in Brussels as part of the POWER Expo. Art enthusiasts and the curious alike have until March, 17th, 2024, to immerse themselves in the captivating and slightly unsettling world of XENO.
