We are in a bunker on Earth although we should be in a spaceship on the way to Mars. Each artwork in this radiation-proof room is a vestige and an annotated bibliography (and epistemic) that explains The Collapse. Dawn is an atomic mushroom carved out of sedimentary rock that references Octavia Butler’s novel of the same name. There was no world war here; it was a low-revolution but irreversible anthropocene in which the world simply began to fall apart. The dystopia was worse than science fiction could have predicted: there were plagues, floods, fires, epidemics, droughts and pollution that were assimilated to the messianic future that was being gestated on the Internet.

Digital neoliberalism established a total domination that began as a fable where the market economy was presented as the best option to reduce poverty. But soon after, unprecedented exploitation modalities appeared and were perfected in Sillicon Valley. The handsmaid's tales are metallic fabric and resin sculptures that seem to cover disintegrating bodies. These illuminated forms are a nod to both Margaret Atwood’s homonymous and Octavia Butler’s The parable of the sower. By 2025 disciplinary regimes were reestablished; citizenship guarantees were cancelled, and women, racialize bodies, sexual and gender minorities, animals and their offspring became subaltern bodies in the service of a new binary, male, hetero, white economy. Perfect lovers (Pioneer plaques), is a series of six bicolam engravings that originated from the original plaque sent into space, which depicted a heterosexual couple, the binary language and the hydrogen particle to cement our integration to the Universal. Later versions remained as relics of the erotic possibilities that were cancelled.

Time is out of joint expresses Hamlet as he realizes that the substance of time had been altered with the murder of his father and his mother’s marriage to the murderer. Time separates, contracts and distends…. In the exhibition room, pink silicone lungs inflate and deflate out of time, and it is this asynchrony that works like a wall clock that can no longer be calibrated. When respiratory epidemics came, artificial bronchi were created; then consciousness was extracted from the body to deposit it in a dropbox. But it was useless; the respiratory virus did nothing more than replicate the forms of abuse perpetrated by domestic, political, religious and cultural instances. As Paul B. Preciado, the body is a “somatheque,” a living political archive in which forms of power are instituted. Our destruction is inoculated by the naturalization of a repeated message.

Do androids dream? Everything burned like fossil fuels. Some survived plastic poisoning, forced migrations, the climate crisis. Before, pets took over the management of our society’s discomfort processes. They were perfect, they offered a shared experience of affection and at the same time specificities and codes to be deciphered. In the novel Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? plants and animals have been replaced – food and water have become a luxury – by their artificial version. We conserve a mechanical metal flower with acrylic petals to keep us company.

The natural history of mankind was coming to an end. We did not anticipate that the ultimate fascism would be embodied by the Tech bros. Ellon, Jeff, Mark and all their friends rose up as the new Übermenschen with sociopathic specters who funded the right to program our future.

They created a circular economy around themselves that replaced world governments, ancient natural selection processes and God. Their rise was so fast that they did not even have time to design the planetary transition. The technocratic elite that could save the world, acted as an algorithm that turned very wealthy people richer and richer, and the rest of humanity into a surplus. They transferred the narratives of patriarchy and colonialism to a space Zion, and as in the New Testament, The CEOs orchestrated a great exodus that would take the techno-billionaires to salvation on Mars, while the rest of the population was left behind. But this ship never took off.

Others did. In August 1977, NASA launched into space an interstellar probe whose mission was to study space beyond the Sun’s heliosphere. Voyager 2 carried a golden disk curated by Carl Sagan, with photographs of Earth and the various animals, world music, and a greeting in 44 languages, as a testament to human creativity and its willingness to connect with the rest of the cosmos. The probe successfully visited the Jova system in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986, Neptune in 1989. In 2018 it left the Sun’s heliosphere and entered the interstellar medium, the space between the stars of a galaxy, composed of gas and dust. The silence of God is a vessel that observes this gravitational constant: As in the Bowie song that inspired the title of the exhibition, we live alone, immersed in our own ruins, before the astral mutism.

(Text by Papús von Saenger)