Down to Earth

For their first public lecture in Luxembourg, the two curators of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, Francelle Cane and Marija Marić, share with the luca audience the background of their research project and exhibition 'Down to Earth', which critically unfolds the space mining project through the perspective of resources.

From the development of human settlements on the Moon to the asteroid mining of rare minerals and metals – the wild imaginaries of extraction-driven growth have, quite literally, transcended the boundaries of the Earth. This displacement of resource exploitation from the exhausted Earth to its ‘invisible’ backstages – celestial bodies, planets, and ultimately, the Moon itself – calls for an urgent debate on the impact this shift will have on our understanding of land, resources, and the commons.

It starts by asking: How does this new iteration of the space race, wrapped in the false promises of endlessly available resources, departs from the existing extractivist logic of capitalism and its destructive environmental and social effects on the ground? How will the ongoing privatization of space, characterized by a sharp turn towards private companies as main actors in the exploitation of space resources, affect the current status of extra-terrestrial bodies as a form of commons? What are the materialities of space mining – its logistics, infrastructures, and workers – and their relationship to the existing geopolitical power hierarchies?

This lecture offers an interdisciplinary and critical prospect on the space mining project through the presentation of Down to Earth, representing Luxembourg at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

• Upon registration, free entry
• Language: English

This lecture is organised by luca - Luxembourg Center for Architecture, within the framework of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. With the support of Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg.