Outer space and the city: Cohabitation strategies with interplanetary infrastructures
Around 230,036,500 pieces of debris orbit in space. Meanwhile, the 174 international exhibitors of the 2022 International Astronautical Congress (Paris) distributed thousands of stickers, tote bags, stress balls, car fresheners, space food and key chains. Attending these paralleling hoarding processes, Space Junkies examines how space debris and space goodies can ‘’forensically decode’’ (Schuppli, 2020) the capital and material accumulation of space exploration and its socio-environmental impacts.
Space Junkies, Photo: Guillaume Pascale, Alice Jarry, Marie-Pier Boucher
Alice Jarry
Alice Jarry is an artist-researcher who specializes in site-specific works, art-science practices and sustainability. Her research bears critically upon materiality and infrastructures to focus on how residual and biomaterials can transform with sites, communities, and technology to yield adaptive and resilient forms. She is an Associate Professor of Design and Hexagram co-researcher at Concordia University.
Marie-Pier Boucher
Marie-Pier Boucher works on the design of environments built to sustain life in extreme conditions. She is co-editor of Space Feminisms (Bloomsbury Press), Being Material (MIT Press), Heteropolis, and Adaptive Actions Madrid. She is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, & Technology and at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and a Hexagram collaborator.
Guillaume Pascale
Guillaume Pascale is haunted by an unstable imagination where contingent time-spaces are populated by forms, things and objects that try to (re)/(de)compose. He brings together DIY devices and multimedia montages to create programmed fictions and composes ambient music using data streams under the avatar Err is human. He is a Hexagram Network doctoral student member at Université du Québec à Montréal.