Licking Meteorites and a Pharmacy of un·Earthing

Abstract

In this text, I discuss my recent artistic work with meteorites in relation to possible future schemes to exploit non-terrestrial resources. Meteorites have been entangled with human cultures for thousands of years, from tool-making to religious practices, in scientific research and as commodities in online-markets. Whereas space mining has been a staple of Science Fiction narratives for over a century, national legislations have recently started to allow for actual future extraction and commercial use of resources on other celestial bodies. By employing the conceptual framework of “un·Earthing” as a transdisciplinary approach to explore existing and potential transformations of humans by and in outer space, I approach meteorites and their current commodification as a “pre-enactment” of these possible future scenarios of interplanetary extractivism. In collaboration with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Vienna, I produced pharmaceutical products containing meteoritic material and documented the process as well as my performative attempts to approach non-terrestrial material. The resulting short film raises questions about meteorites as a pharmakon of the ambivalent processes of un·Earthing and human-non-earthly relations.