Eröffnung: 23. September 2020, 19.00 Uhr Museumsquartier, Sternenpassage, Wien
Zur Eröffnung werden die eigens produzierten Foto-Collagen und der Kleinkatalog zur Sternenpassage „lumen zine, Katrin Plavčak – Heft 5“ präsentiert. Die Künstlerin ist anwesend.
Space: Resources and the Alien
The history of space exploration begins with humans projecting the familiar to the outside. We named areas on the lunar surface after terrestrial seas, although the moon has no oceans. Today there is even talk of mining resources in space; this, too, is a projection of human behavior. But a reality check quickly puts an end to such fanciful endeavors: Fusion reactors, for which the rare isotope helium-3 should be “harvested” on the moon, do not yet exist. The costs of mining rare metals on near-Earth asteroids are astronomical, as it were, and will remain unprofitable for quite some time—especially since, unlike here on Earth, we do not know of any easily extractable ores on the nearby planets or asteroids. Even the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted by our own standards. A quote from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s book Solaris puts it in a nutshell: We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror.
Text: Christian Köberl, in „lumen zine, Katrin Plavčak – issue 5“, 2020
Kuratorin: Sabine Jelinek, Lehrende der Malerei & Grafik an der Kunstuniversität Linz