Axel Straschnoy – We Believe and Accept that These Beings Exist

Comunicato stampa

WIZARD LAB is pleased to present Axel Straschnoy’s solo exhibition We Believe and Accept that These Beings Exist, with a text by Charles Esche.
This project was developed as part of the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Foundation Prize 2025 for EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, where it is on view until August 9 2026. At WIZARD LAB, Straschnoy will present a selection of works from the museum exhibition alongside certain pieces which have never been seen before.
The text by J. Posadas (born Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, Argentina, 1912–Rome, 1981), an Argentine Trotskyist leader that influences 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 also the civilizations 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 mobilized the figure of the extraterrestrial not as a fantasy but as 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 installation at WIZARD LAB brings together large, hand-lettered linen banners as well as framed texts on paper quoting Posadas’ speech, followed by a video showing interviews with Trotskyist activists, historians, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists, and UFO contactees.