As part of the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Foundation Prize 2025, artist and filmmaker Axel Straschnoy’s solo exhibition We believe and accept these beings exist opens at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art on April 15. It will be on view from 15 April to 9 August 2026.
We Believe and Accept These Beings Exist is an artistic inquiry into the strange and fertile space where revolutionary politics, science fiction, and cosmic imagination meet. The project begins with the provocative ideas of J. Posadas, the Latin American Trotskyist leader who, in 1968, famously argued that UFOs were real and that extraterrestrial civilisations must, by necessity, be communist. His leap of thought—absurd, visionary, and deeply political—provides a lens to consider how utopian desire extends beyond Earth.
The installation at EMMA combines two elements: large, hand-lettered linen banners quoting Posadas’ speech, and a constellation of suspended video screens showing interviews with Trotskyist activists, historians, SETI scientists, and UFO contactees. Visitors will move through a darkened space like navigators in a lost ideological galaxy, encountering fragments of political oratory, speculation, and testimony. The design draws inspiration from traditions of political murals, Trotskyist iconography, and the visual language of speculative science fiction.
The project does not seek to retell history in a straightforward documentary mode, but instead to explore how belief and imagination shape our capacity to envision radically different futures. At its core, the work asks what it means to believe: to believe in aliens, in utopia, and in the possibility of a post-capitalist society. It examines how the radical hopes of one political movement might resonate again in today’s climate of ecological collapse, authoritarian resurgence, and a pervasive sense of crisis.
The text by J. Posadas that anchors this project is a speech delivered in 1968, later published in French by his own press. In it, Posadas affirmed that UFOs were not only real, but that the civilisations behind them must be communist. What might seem like an eccentric digression was, in fact, a continuation of Trotskyist reasoning: a belief in the historical inevitability of socialism, projected beyond the Earth. Posadas mobilised the figure of the extraterrestrial not as a fantasy, but as a political proof, a demonstration that communism was both possible and necessary. In this sense, the speech condenses the utopian and apocalyptic energies of the late 1960s: the threat of nuclear war, the hope of world revolution, and the persistence of imagining futures that break radically from the present.
The project is not about nostalgia but about continuity: how forgotten radical dreams might still spark imagination in our present. It invites the viewer to look back at a moment when politics reached for the stars, not to escape Earth, but to demand another way of living upon it.
Axel Straschnoy is a visual artist from Buenos Aires, currently based in Helsinki. His work explores social practices within science and art through different media. With an interest in expeditions of all kinds—both literal and metaphorical, scientific and artistic—his research spans from films for planetariums, performances, cinematic installations, editions, travelling exhibitions, museum collections, and VR films. Collaboration plays an important role in his practice, as he engages with different spaces and ways to frame interactions between artworks and audiences.