SELECTED WORKS

The Devils of Paasselkä

Axel Straschnoy’s film The Devils of Paasselkä (2020) investigates the mysterious and unknown aspects associated with the Paasselkä Lake in Eastern Finland. Formed by a meteorite collision that occurred at some moment in the last 1,900 million years, the lake renders compasses ineffective. Accounts of peculiar luminous phenomena hovering above it, exhibiting independent and rapid movements across different locations, have been recorded as early as the 1700s. Straschnoy’s film combines compelling images from the artist’s trip to the lake with interviews with local people to investigate these phenomena. 

We Believe and Accept These Beings Exist

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 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.

Formally, the installation at EMMA (opening in April 2026) 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.

This project is not about nostalgia but about continuity: how forgotten radical dreams might still spark imagination in our present. It invites us 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. 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. His argument rested on a speculative syllogism: if these beings had developed the extraordinary technical capacities required for interstellar travel, they must also have solved the social contradictions that on Earth produced inequality, violence, and exploitation.

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. Analytically, the text functions as both symptom and proposition. It reveals the extent to which political imagination was stretched during the Cold War, when even the possibility of alien life was incorporated into ideological struggle. At the same time, it proposes an audacious extension of Marxist thought, one that links the horizon of communism not only to earthly struggles but also to the cosmos itself.

WIZARD LAB presented a selection of the text works on paper and two photos in Amsterdam in February 2026, anticipating the artist’s forthcoming exhibition at EMMA in April.

The Source

The Source is a collaborative art and science project by Axel Straschnoy and Iain Sutton, being developed at the European Spallation Source (ESS) between 2021 and 2026. Blending drawing, photography, neutron activation, public presentations, residencies, and guest visits to nuclear research facilities, the project aims to create a portrait of the world’s most powerful neutron source.

Straschnoy and Sutton set out to pioneer a new form of photography—one that replaces photons with neutrons and silver halides with gold atoms—to reveal the invisible processes that shape our understanding of the world.

The ESS is poised to become the most powerful accelerator-driven neutron source ever built. It will generate revolutionary images and data, yet much of this work takes place deep underground, beyond the reach of sight. This creates a paradox: a setting that appears still, yet contains the concentrated energy to drive profound scientific transformations.

What does it mean to see in such conditions? What hidden structures support and frame these experiments? Could a facility like this be pushed to its conceptual limits—to create a self-portrait, capturing its essence in a plate of gold?

The final piece of The Source will be a gold-foiled plate irradiated on the ESS beamline. This plate will contain a portrait of the ESS rendered in radiation, invisible to the eye. When exposed to photographic paper, the irradiated gold will produce a visible imprint—an image encoded in radiation, translated into light.

Driven by research, the project evolves continuously. Its final work is accompanied by an expanding constellation of outcomes, which take shape in various forms and contexts over time.

The Source was initiated during Nanocosmic Investigations, an EU-funded residency organised by Malmö Museer, Inter Arts Center, and ESS in 2021–2022.

THE FINNISH ASTRONAUTICAL SOCIETY

The Finnish Astronautical Society is a project exploring the history and ongoing evolution of Finland’s Space Programme. It highlights the country’s leading astronautics organization, established in 1959 by a group of schoolboys inspired by the space race. Driven by passion, technical ingenuity, and minimal resources, they pursued their dream of building Finland’s first rocket. Though their envisioned rocket was never completed, the society remains a hub for aspiring rocketeers to experiment and tackle the complexities of space flight.

Each piece in the series comprises a rocket designed and launched by the artist, a photograph capturing the moment of liftoff, and a certificate of authenticity.