Deception Island

For ’Deception Island’, the inaugural exhibition at the new location of max goelitz in Munich, Troika explores the fragile boundaries between what is seen and unseen, present and absent, natural and constructed.

The works in ’Deception Island’ chart a cartography of displacement and emergence, where extinct species, digital flora and machine-mediated visions converge. Taking its title from a volcanic island at the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula – a place whose very geography conceals a flooded caldera beneath its surface – the exhibition reflects on environments in flux and the systems, technological and cultural, that attempt to capture, preserve or replace them. The island itself surfaces in one of the speculative landscapes from Troika’s new series ’Out of Place, Out of Time’ (2025), in which they stage unlikely encounters between geological epochs, digital processes, and speculative memory. An extinct species of Key Largo cactus appears to grow in Arctic ice or take root in tropical swamplands. These image worlds seem like projections of a machine subconscious, fed by the collective visual memory of the Earth. They were created using text-to-image algorithms that generate pictures from short language inputs in fractions of a second. Formally, Troika transfers these fleeting visions into a medium of physical permanence: the platinotype.

This 19th-century photographic process uses platinum and palladium salts – materials employed both in the early days of photography and in today’s semiconductor technology. The choice of this durable support lends the image a material presence that extends far beyond the ephemeral input of digital algorithms. Troika’s imaginary biotopes negotiate not only geographical disorientation, but also a shift in our understanding of reality: What does “nature” mean when it is not only represented, but newly constructed through algorithmic processes? Which images and narratives emerge, and which are lost in the process?

The feeling of arrival on uncertain and new terrain continues in ’Ultraflora’ (2025): the sculptures appear as complex metallic structures whose surfaces seem organically grown and yet artificially modeled. In the works, plant tissue, root systems and mechanical processes overlap. Volumetric scans of so-called pioneer plants – such as the Tree Aeonium, known for its ability to survive in extreme climates – are transferred onto a virtual spatial grid, reshaped, and then re-materialized with the help of a robotic arm. Molten metal filament is layered, so that the sculptures gradually grow into their final form. In this way, works emerge that make visible the transition between nature and technology. The resulting “border-crosser” plants belong to Troika’s speculative Field Guide to Virtual Botany. They are species that exist in threshold spaces, elude classical classifications, and actively transform their environment. They grow where opposites meet, at the edges of land and sea, between life and death, between reality and fiction. As ecological wanderers, symbolic threshold beings, and metaphorical markers, they appear in a new form. What was once vegetative now emerges as a techno-organic relic – prototypes of post-biological growth.