A0125: Towards a New Symbiosis‘ unfolds as a speculative eco-corporation, asking what it means to build futures where humans, technology and the natural world might evolve to become mutually symbiotic. Part installation, part prototype, the work sits between corporate showroom and science-fiction set, drawing viewers into an environment that is at once sleek and seductive, yet charged with the subtle tension between utopic aspiration and artifice.
In an era shaped by accelerating AI, climate emergency and shifting social infrastructures, Papworth situates her work within the framework of the Symbiocene, an epoch imagined beyond the Anthropocene, in which entanglement, interdependence and co-creation displace extractive models of “progress.” In doing so the work becomes less a utopia than a rehearsal: a space where futures can be tested, inhabited and felt.
At its centre is a pod-like form, where logos, hydroponic growth systems and a meditative video environment combine to evoke the simultaneous familiarity of the corporate showroom and the strangeness of a posthuman sanctuary. Papworth’s installation does not describe the future so much as invite us into its architecture, offering a glimpse of a future both desirable and unsettling; a vision that mirrors our present aspirations while asking what forms of progress we are truly willing to imagine.