“Man is perhaps not the center, not the focus of the universe. One may go as far as to believe that there exists above him on the animal level beings whose behaviour is as alien to him as his own must be to the day fly or the whale.” – André Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto or Not

At the “Bigfoot Expedition” museum in the southern foothills of the Appalachians, we find, behind glass display cases, objects of reverence: mangled pie-tins, crushed peanut butter jars, tufts of fur, and molds cast from generous hominoid feet. A diorama shows two woodsmen desperately pushing against the door of their cabin—a single furry arm breaks through, while the headphones fill our ears with shouts, grunts, and bangs. Something wants to come in. Like the inverse of some holy annunciation, we find ourselves in the presence of alien relics; the freakshow saints of the forest, promising terror or salvation, in the form of monstrous inside-out evangelism. We know the subversive potential of receiving guests, and especially, of taking seriously what they see, how they see us. All so-called “Enlightenment” stems from these encounters, the perspective of a visitation that throws the (all too misguided) assumptions about the natural order of things into a visible crisis. Strangers come from the depths of the forests and the lakes, from other worlds, from hearsay and whispers, the constellation of unknowns that roughly coagulate into a darksome “out there”…