2024
2024
The work presented here was undertaken during the studio founder's tenure at CAF×.
Inxects, founded by architect Pavels Hedström in 2021, works at the edge of architecture, wearable design, and biology, treating garments and habitats as instruments for renegotiating the boundary between human bodies and the systems around them. The exhibition brought together four of the studio's devices: the Fog-X Jacket and Fog-X Backpack, both of which harvest drinking water from desert fog through an integrated mesh inspired by the Atacama cactus and the Namib beetle; the Inxect Suit, a wearable habitat in which mealworms convert plastic waste into protein; and the Gaia Communication System, a haptic vest translating environmental data into tactile sensation. The idea of staging Inxects' work as a public exhibition, and the selection and framing of which projects to show, emerged from the collaboration between Inxects' and CAF×'s teams. Three of the four devices already existed; the Gaia Communication System was developed specifically for Strange Adaptions, with part of the exhibition's funding directed toward its realisation.
The exhibition's written argument held that architecture has long served as an instrument of separation, drawing a line between a rational interior and a wild exterior managed from behind glass. Inxects' devices propose the reverse: an architecture of relations rather than boundaries, deliberately ambivalent about the technologies it deploys, refusing the comfort of clean solutions in favour of tools that invite a different relationship with the non-human world — cacti, desert beetles, mealworms, bats — as sources of adaptive intelligence rather than metaphor alone.
CAF×'s role extended through the full arc of the project — guiding and supporting Hedström through production and fabrication issues, exhibition logistics, and funding applications, alongside giving the work its architectural form. The exhibition itself was built entirely in house, from the wooden display structures to the lighting system, translating Inxects' research into a spatial and narrative sequence across the four window bays of the Halmtorvet façade: mannequins staged in rubble, sand, and stripped plastic, lit for the street at night, accompanied by moodboards, process diagrams, and screens running field footage from the studio's desert and coastal fieldwork. All visual material for the exhibition — identity, the design of everything from printed panels to digital assets, and production of all of it — was handled in house.
Behind the glass, a second layer of content was made accessible during open hours for visitors willing to look closer: sketches, an interview with Hedström, and a film shot in Georgia documenting the Gaia Communication System, the exhibition's newly developed fourth device. The exhibition's opening event and the public programme that ran alongside it for the full duration of the show were coordinated internally, and communications for the project — website, the CAF× Journal, and podcast content, press, newsletter, and social media channels — were run in house throughout.
Strange Adaptions was supported by Statens Kunstfond, Realdania, and the Municipality of Copenhagen.
Exhibition Design
Environmental Graphics
Brand & Identity Systems
Copywriting & Editing
PR & Communications
Marketing
Campaigns
Print & Digital Design
Project Management
Event Management & Coordination
Team:
Valeria Granillo, Pavels Hedström, the Inxects team, Søren Nørkjær Bang, Ida Willadsen Bang Kjeldsen, Janosh Heydorn, Nina Margania, Josephine Michau, Pernille Maria Bärnheim.