From the moment human beings decided to conquer the solar system, their relationship with their own planet Earth was profoundly altered: other worlds like ours could just as well exist.
From then on, we have relentlessly sought to verify this by pushing back the limits of that “infinite immensity of spaces that I do not know and that do not know me,” evoked by Blaise Pascal in 1669.
Nearly a century later, the German thinker Novalis was already asserting: “We dream of journeys through the universe, but is not the universe within us?” This was confirmed on December 24, 1968, by the astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission, who witnessed and photographed for the first time an “Earthrise” as it can be seen beyond our horizon. William Anders, the author of this iconic image, retained only one essential conclusion: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, but the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
At a time when the climate crisis is becoming increasingly devastating, the exhibition INTERSTELLAR offers a counterpoint to the history of the space epic and the utopias of the 1970s illustrated by the iconic film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, posing a question that remains as fundamental as ever: “What if we reimagined the Earth?”
At the heart of the immersive space of the HAB Galerie, “our world” is thus transformed into an almost unknown territory to be rediscovered in new ways, through the works of around twenty contemporary visual artists, photographers, video makers, and designers.
By interweaving the infinitely distant with the extremely close, each of them reveals not only alternative perspectives or fictional forms of the planet Earth, but above all reshapes possible collective futures in the form of original and fascinating uchronias—so that we no longer remain, individually, in “the uncertainty of the eternity of [our] future condition” (Blaise Pascal).
