Installation Views

In 1997 NASA published an Educational Video: „Destination: Mars“. The fictional narrative included an expedition beginning in 2018 and scheduled to last until 2020. The crew is accompanied in this narrative as they experience the journey from the perspectives of their respective fields of activity. The astronauts* talk about personal impressions, their mission, their tasks, hopes and problems, which they record in the so-called log. At the end of the video - they are already on their way back to Earth in June 2020 - we see how an astronaut notes:

„ (...) but as I stare out the ships window I can‘t help but think about the future: I wonder who will write the first Marsian poetry, design the first Marsian buildings, start the first Marsian families. How long will we take to make this planet a real home? Not for a few years but for millenia...“

In our reality 2020 has already passed and the euphoric desire to (re)construct a world on Mars, even to live there in the longer term, has taken on more concrete and ambitious traits. The imagination and investments become bigger, while the surface images of Mars, its ground and mountain ranges become more and more precise to further fuel our imagination of an existence. All the utopias following on from this, however, equally open up questions about our current existence on Earth: Is the urge to penetrate into new worlds, despite all our ambition, also a moral and political failure, admitting that a new beginning is a sign of shame? 

In an imaginary goodbye from Earth, this video installation „celebrates“ the farewell as a subconscious Karaoke video caught between the lives of different species and the human observer. Based on Whitney Houston‘s „I will always love you“ we declare with melancholy the final goodbye to our planet (if we have not yet) – and ask: Who will gain first access to Mars in the future and who will (have to) continue to exist on Earth? How does parallel life affect the human body and how is our sensation and communication affected?If you assume that humanity will succeed in moving to Mars, what narratives will remain from our planet?