Image by Adriana Knouf.
Thursday 25 August 7-9 pm, as part of CLICK in Helsingør, you can experience Amateur Lithopanspermia a new work by artist Adriana Knouf. The work has been created during her residency at Art Hub Copenhagen as part of the Pan-European S+T+ARTS-project.
At the event Adriana Knouf gives a talk on her work and there will be cold drinks and soup.
The talk will be in English. More about the event below..
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Participation is free. Get your free ticket here.
Free transport by bus from Copenhagen to Elsinor:
Departure: Art Hub Copenhagen, Halmtorvet 27, 1700 København V. 6 pm (please arrive 15 minutes prior)
Return:
Departure: Kulturværftet, Allegade 2, 3000 Helsingør. 9.15 pm.
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About Amateur Lithopanspermia
At the event, Adriana Knouf will give a talk on her new installation piece Amateur Lithopanspermia, which will also be displayed at the event.
Amateur Lithopanspermia is an experiment in lichen-human hybrids for the purpose of space travel. Rather than focusing on making space travel amenable to the human form, I propose that we merge aspects of ourselves with an organism, lichen, that can deal with the ravages of space. The collection of human materials that will sustain the lichen will occur from those who are often excluded from space activities, such as women, people of color, the differently abled, and LGBTQ+ people.
The consensual collection of materials, as well as the offering of these materials to the lichen, inverts the usual relationship between humans and other living entities. These lichen-human hybrids will be encased in fallen meteorites, thus launching from earth what has already come here from the cosmos. The rocks+hybrids will travel to Mars, or elsewhere in the solar system, using solar sails as their means of propulsion, obviating the need for chemical propellant in space. Workshops here on earth will weave new tales about non-anthropocentric space travel. These stories become technologies themselves, as they allow us to make manifest new desires for our more-than-human lives in outer space, pushing against colonialist and extractivist narratives.
Additionally, the project questions the desire for "purity" in making contact with other worlds in the solar system, highlighting the necessity of contamination and mixing when differing others come into contact.
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This project has received funding from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement LC01641664. https://www.starts.eu/starts-regional-centres/
