1 October 2026
Opening: Thursday, 1 October, 7–9 pm
WIZARD LAB, Milan
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.
The project was developed as part of the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Foundation Prize 2025 for EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, where it was on view from 15 April to 9 August 2026. At WIZARD LAB, Straschnoy presents a selection of works from the museum exhibition alongside works that have never been shown before.
We Believe and Accept that These Beings Exist takes as its starting point a 1968 speech by J. Posadas (born Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, Argentina, 1912–Rome, 1981), an Argentine Trotskyist leader who argued that UFOs were real and that the advanced civilisations behind them must necessarily be communist.
What might initially appear to be an eccentric digression was, in fact, an extension of Posadas’ political reasoning: a belief in the historical inevitability of socialism projected beyond Earth. Posadas mobilised the figure of the extraterrestrial not simply as fantasy, but as political proof—a demonstration that another form of social organisation was possible.
The speech encapsulates some of the utopian and apocalyptic energies of the late 1960s: the threat of nuclear war, the hope of world revolution, and the persistent desire to imagine futures radically different from the present.
At WIZARD LAB, the installation brings together large hand-lettered linen banners and framed texts on paper quoting Posadas’ speech, followed by a video featuring interviews with Trotskyist activists, historians, SETI scientists, and UFO contactees.
Through these different voices and materials, Straschnoy explores the unusual territory where revolutionary politics, science, science fiction, and cosmic imagination meet.
The exhibition does not seek to retell this history in a straightforward documentary form. Instead, it examines 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 also considers how the radical hopes of an earlier political movement might resonate again today, at a moment marked by ecological crisis, authoritarian resurgence, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty.
As Charles Esche writes in his text for the exhibition:
“He is not substituting faith for politics. He is asserting that scientific capacity and social organisation are a single thing, which is what one of the banners says outright. That proposition needs to be legible as art in 2026 precisely because it is no longer legible as politics.”
We Believe and Accept that These Beings Exist is not about nostalgia, but continuity: how forgotten radical dreams might still activate the imagination in the present. It returns to a moment when politics reached for the stars—not as a means of escaping Earth, but as a way of demanding another way of living upon it.
Axel Straschnoy at SUBPLACE Milano
On 21 September, from 6–8 pm, They Must Exist opens at SUBPLACE, Stazione del Passante Ferroviario di Villapizzone, Via Arnaldo Fusinato, 20156 Milan.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with WIZARD and forms part of the same project presented at WIZARD LAB from 1 October.
About Axel Straschnoy
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.
Collaboration plays an important role in his practice, as he engages with different spaces and ways of framing interactions between artworks and audiences. With an interest in expeditions of all kinds—literal and metaphorical, scientific and artistic—his research spans films for planetariums, performances, cinematic installations, editions, travelling exhibitions, museum collections, and VR films.
Straschnoy participated in Le Pavillon residency at Palais de Tokyo (2008–09) and studied Art History at the University of Buenos Aires.
He was awarded the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Foundation Prize in 2025.
Recent exhibitions include We Believe and Accept that These Beings Exist, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, 2026; Towards Space, Turku Art Museum, 2025; 18 Minutes from the Sun, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, 2023; Subterranean, Amos Rex, Helsinki, 2022; Nanocosmic Investigations, Inter Arts Center, Malmö, 2022; The Devils of Paasselkä, Forum Box, Helsinki, 2022; The Permian Extinction, Turku Museum, 2021; Float, Andrée Polarcenter Grenna Museum, Gränna, 2019; La Figure de la Terre, Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires, 2014; and Opening Archive, Ateneum Museum Library, Helsinki, 2013.
Visit WIZARD LAB
WIZARD LAB
Exhibition Space — Milan, Italy
Corso di Porta Ticinese 87
20123 Milan, Italy
Monday – Friday
3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
info@wizardgallery.com
Opening
Thursday, 1 October 2026
7:00 – 9:00 pm
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Image: Axel Straschnoy, We Believe and Accept that These Beings Exist, installation view at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, April–August 2026.