Andrej Škufca, Katrin Euller & Miriam Stoney
Intruders, Uninvited Into Chaos
03/09 — 10/10/2025
“None of the insensate forms I saw that night corresponded to the human figure or any conceivable use …”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things”
What if telepathy isn’t science fiction but the ground floor of existence—a pre-verbal shimmer that pulses beneath language, logic, and even love? Not the movie version, all mind-reading and militarized ESP, but something stranger: an ambient form of knowing, of tuning into the patterns that precede speech. Children sometimes live there. So do octopuses. Perception on the spectrum, dream logic, fungal networks—all operating on frequencies outside the normative bandwidth.
And what if the ones trying to speak to us aren’t even “human” or don’t care about our reception?
In the sci-fi films Solaris (1972), Stalker (1979), and Annihilation (2018), alien entities don’t invade—they persist. They radiate intelligence not through dialogue but through landscape, rhythm, mutation. They don’t want to destroy us. They don’t want to be us. They might not even notice us. And perhaps that’s the most terrifying thing of all. They destabilize not through violence but through form. They operate on atmospheres rather than arguments.
Now imagine that this kind of slow, ambient, unfathomable consciousness exists not in deep space but somewhere slightly less dramatic—say, between Koper and Piran.
And it’s made of slime.
Petola, the living skin of the Sečovlje salt pans, is a microbial mat of cyanobacteria, diatoms, and algae cultivated through centuries of embodied care. It is at once infrastructure, archive, and quiet collaborator. Without it, traditional salt production—artisanal, seasonal, gloriously unproductive by capitalist standards—wouldn’t work. Petola doesn’t speak, but it does remember. It does its thing. It is material memory—essential and alive.
This exhibition departs from the suspicion that we are not alone—not in the extraterrestrial sense but in the epistemological one. That there are things in our immediate environment—microbial, architectural, mineral—that carry intention or resonance beyond our frames of understanding. That the coast itself might be trying to tell us something. The question is not whether we can understand, but whether we can learn to listen differently.
Like Borges’s furniture from nowhere or the shimmer in Garland’s Annihilation, Petola resists categorization. It is alive but not expressive; cultivated but not owned. It’s a gooey witness to centuries of human labour, salt rituals, and ecological entanglement. It embodies the impossibility of “the natural” existing separately from “the cultural”. It resists the extractive gaze. It insists on maintenance as a mode of relation. It is, quite literally, a slippery subject.
Meanwhile, just down the coast, Luka Koper orchestrates its own choreography—of cranes, containers, commodities, and cars. If Sečovlje is slow power, Koper is speed logic: 24/7 logistics in full capitalist bloom. Here, infrastructure doesn’t shimmer—it screams. It is extractive, efficient, scalable. The port and the pans form a coastal dialectic: two visions of the future, two temporalities, two kinds of intelligence.
The two-part exhibition Intruders, Uninvited Into Chaos stages this tension within an architectural, typological, and socio-political encounter between a large-scale former salt warehouse on the coastline of Portorož and a Venetian Gothic palace on the main square of Koper—the former a concentration point of slow salty power and the latter a centre of representation, of commercial and social life.
The works by Andrej Škufca, Katrin Euller, and Miriam Stoney form an alien landscape that remembers this coastal dialectic. It has become part of its DNA, its knowledge, its consciousness—but it is not the same anymore. This pulsating landscape remembers the Petola’s patient production and the port’s restless ruckus as something it knew well in the past. But the landscape has evolved—without us, despite us, unbothered by us—and in melancholy moments it shares its electronic ode to a nature that never existed or is now long gone.
Škufca’s speculative installation is less an object and more a landscape pulsating with the memory of a world humans once inhabited. Euller’s sound installation takes the artificial into overdrive, creating speculative resonance and a thick acoustic fog—not ambient as backdrop but ambient as the matrix that envelops us. It is a zone you move through, or that moves through you. Meanwhile, Stoney’s short texts drift between narrative and non-narrative, inference and refusal. They do not explain; they translate—not in clear and known language, but like an unstable, arrhythmic radio signal. But hey, isn’t the medium the message anyway?
Together, these works evoke a sort of “philosophical weird realism” of Petola. Not symbolism, not allegory, but proximity to a presence that does not reveal itself. They do not romanticize the alien. They dwell with it. They do not ask what it means. They ask how to stay with it, despite not knowing. What if the most radical politics now is not mastery but maintenance? Not conquest but curiosity? Not revelation but relation?
The salt pans don’t ask to be understood, and the port doesn’t ask to be loved. And the Zone—whether in science fiction or Slovenian infrastructure—doesn’t promise catharsis. It promises that you will get a little lost, and you better get comfortable with it. To enter this space is to enter that confusion willingly. Not to solve it but to dwell in it. To let the alien speak—or not—and to listen anyway.
Curiosity got the better of fear.
We did not close our eyes.
TEXT & CURATOR: Laura Amann Marín
The present exhibition represents a transfer of the premiere presentation at the Monfort Gallery in Portorož and the Loža Gallery in Koper.
Andrej Škufca (1987) is a visual artist and a member of the editorial team of the magazine Šum. His works have been presented, among others, at the National Museum of 21st Century Art MAXXI in Rome; Ludwig Museum in Budapest; Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Oslo; Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova and Moderna galerija in Ljubljana; Maribor Art Gallery; and the 34th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (MGLC).
Laura Amann Marìn auraamann (1986) is a Vienna-based curator and architect, co-founder of Significant Other, a platform exploring intersections of art and architecture. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the De Appel Curatorial Programme Amsterdam, she was part of the curatorial team at Kunsthalle Wien with WHW. Her projects often focus on themes of madness, intimacy, desire, and sensuality as forms of knowledge and resistance. She has taught at the Vienna University of Technology and will become co-curatorial director of Shedhalle Zürich (2026–2030).
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