Nadim Choufi lives in Beirut and primarily works with video, 3D animation, and sculpture. An alumnus of Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace fellowship, he exhibited his work regionally and internationally in Beirut Art Center, Sharjah Art Foundation, The New School, and Macao.
His work addresses techno-scientific progress and its non-neutrality, often focusing on the materiality of designed organisms, language, products, and bodies.
VideoStill
Entangle for the Alien to Continue
Entangle for the Alien to Continue
On earth and other planets, extreme climate conditions have shifted the nature of living space. The problems of space are no longer physical; they are biological and are seen in biotech and architecture firms designing at the limits of life.
The video essay begins by tracing the influence of the pet-toy Sea Monkeys, marketed as Instant Life, on bioengineering and multi-planetary architecture as they exemplify failed promissory capitalistic mechanisms of care for built living environments and species while unfolding to complete the transition from capitalistic efficiency to ecoefficiency.
Yet 100-year architectural plans for Mars colonies and bioengineered extremophiles are produced for an unsustainable survival of capitalism that seeks to overcome its own ecological limits. Entangle for the Alien to Continue is a series of 3D infrastructures that exist as sculptures and in a video essay that deals with the material trajectory of evolution through design and a reconfiguring of efficiency to eco-efficiency, where the care for entanglement replaces production as an evolutionary scheme.
The sculptures subvert the fiber-optic-like networks of bacterial vertical farming and Mars Scientific City into open porous dissipating ecologies of unbounded bodies where entanglement through design becomes the care for a new alien. An alien, meshed life forms whose place in our forms of life are yet to be determined, is then developed in this work to question the ontology of living and living space and time through linguistic, biological and material connections of a speculative eco-efficiency.
Primordial Architects 1 Sculpture model
Alien Infrastructures Sculpture models
Primordial Architects 2 Sculpture model
VideoStill
Entangle for the Alien to Continue
