HOW TO: MIND THE MOON
How to: mind the moon was developed by The Canadian Centre for Architeture and Lev Bratishenko in collaboration with the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The outcome of the workshop, a material library, is produced and exhibited as part of the exhibition Down to Earth of the 2023 Luxembourg Pavilion in Sale d’Armi, Arsenale di Venezia, curated by Francelle Cane and Marija Marić.
A perverted material library by Lev Bratishenko, Francelle Cane, Anastasia Kubrak, Jane Mah Hutton, Marija Marić, Amelyn Ng, Bethany Rigby, and Fred Scharmen
Space mining, the extraction of resources in outer space, is a project tending to become a reality. In search of rare minerals, metals, and other valuable materials, the wild imaginaries of extraction-driven growth have literally transcended the boundaries of Earth. This displacement of resource exploitation from the exhausted Earth to its ‘invisible’ hinterland—the Moon and other celestial bodies—calls for an urgent debate on the impact this shift will have on our understanding of land, resources, and commons.
How to: mind the moon offers another way of reading five lunar materials: regolith, lunar dust, solar wind, seconal sodium, and aluminium. A perversion of the format of a material sample and datasheet—technical documents commonly used in material science to describe chemical and mechanical properties of materials—the workshop outlines another kind of material library, that which goes beyond the perceived scientific neutrality of materials. Instead, it frames the political, social, environmental, and cultural conditions of materials, both as a physical matter and a form of fiction.
Text: Canadian Centre for Architecture
Photos: Anita Cariolaro
A perverted material library by Lev Bratishenko, Francelle Cane, Anastasia Kubrak, Jane Mah Hutton, Marija Marić, Amelyn Ng, Bethany Rigby, and Fred Scharmen
Space mining, the extraction of resources in outer space, is a project tending to become a reality. In search of rare minerals, metals, and other valuable materials, the wild imaginaries of extraction-driven growth have literally transcended the boundaries of Earth. This displacement of resource exploitation from the exhausted Earth to its ‘invisible’ hinterland—the Moon and other celestial bodies—calls for an urgent debate on the impact this shift will have on our understanding of land, resources, and commons.
How to: mind the moon offers another way of reading five lunar materials: regolith, lunar dust, solar wind, seconal sodium, and aluminium. A perversion of the format of a material sample and datasheet—technical documents commonly used in material science to describe chemical and mechanical properties of materials—the workshop outlines another kind of material library, that which goes beyond the perceived scientific neutrality of materials. Instead, it frames the political, social, environmental, and cultural conditions of materials, both as a physical matter and a form of fiction.
Text: Canadian Centre for Architecture
Photos: Anita Cariolaro