At the intersection of science fiction, material experimentation, and speculative biology, Steel Genetics constructs a fictional ecology in which taxonomy breaks down. The exhibition proposes a world where life is no longer given but generated, and where forms exist as unstable negotiations between code, matter, and imagination.
Steel Genetics offers a speculative landscape where biology, technology, and fiction converge into material form. Classification loses its authority, and the act of naming starts to resemble a failed spell. Neither landscape nor collection in any traditional sense, it stages a fictional ecology of forms: trees that are not trees, relics without a past, specimens without a stable taxonomy. But what kind of nature is being generated here? And what does it mean to fabricate “life-like” systems when the boundary between fabrication and emergence is no longer stable? What would it mean to grow something that is not yet possible, and to treat fabrication as a form of propagation?
Conceived as a fictional collection of trees, an artificial, inverted arboretum, it draws from the visual language of science fiction cinema, assembling sculptural entities that exist beyond natural and conventional taxonomies. Totems, suspended forms, and dispersed entities occupy the space. They propose a collection of hybrid botanical entities that carry a fictional narrative while embodying mutations between techniques, materials, and forms, oscillating between the organic and the alien. At the core of Jessica Boubetra’s practice lies science fiction as both method and framework. The sculptures emerge from a fusion of technological processes and organic principles; forms that would be impossible to generate without this synthesis. Each sculpture functions as a specimen within an imagined classification system, where geological, vegetal, and technological registers blur. They approach the question of how such a world becomes thinkable at all, through what kinds of fictions, and under what conditions.
