Constellation of spatial imaginaries 2 : rethinking our links to space and the Earth through the study of alternative narratives of the cosmos (ongoing)

artistic and theorical research
2023 - ongoing

At the dawn of a new space age (Pasco, 2017), we are witnessing a return to the enthusiasm for the conquest of the stars. This takes shape in a technolo- gical momentum with the arrival on the front of the stage of private agencies such as SpaceX, which advocates a vision of space focused on exploration in order to «come to the aid of humanity. (Davenport, 2018). In parallel, new politico-military rivalries between emerging public space agencies, genera- ting space races, recently towards Mars (Sourbès-Verger, 2022).

On the other hand, the awareness of the uniqueness of our planet Ear- th leads some artists and philosophers to conceive other spatial narra- tives (Aït-Touati, 2022). These, modeled among other things by the climatic context, challenge the dominant narratives by proposing anti-capitalist and non-anthropocentric forms of relationship to the cosmos. Without systema- tically falling into the utopia of a return to nature or an exclusion from space travel, these stories reappropriate and speculate on other spatial possibilities.

From a selected corpus of texts and artistic and philosophical works, the project aims to answer the following questions: in the face of hegemonic narratives and representations of the cosmos, what types of alternatives exist? How are these alternatives and what are their characteristics? How do we make these other voices heard so that they fill the plurality of our representation of the cosmos?