About the Project
Our personal belongings are integral to how we cultivate and make sense of our myriad individual and social identities. Complex, occasionally contradictory, and intimate, our relationship to our things can be unconscious and under-examined, yet help form the foundations of our beliefs, behaviours, and practices in theworld.
This co-curated ethnographic exhibition gathers together a selection of objects and their biographies from the personal collections of space enthusiasts. Through the journeys, histories, and social lives of the objects themselves, in addition to the process of collaboratively designing and producing the exhibition, enthusiasm is explored as a tangible social energy which can be circulated, shared, and repurposed, much like an object itself. At its heart, this exhibition asks how one incorporates outer space into their everyday lives by centring mundane yet precious objects which embody, represent, and facilitate dreams, beliefs, and experiences which bring space and possible futures closer to home.
In addition, the exhibition explores how anthropologists can incorporate collaborative methods and co-curation of knowledge into fieldwork, and was community-collected and implemented by members of Adryon Kozel’s research participants and members of the space community. The project forms an integral part of her doctoral research into the practices and narratives of space enthusiasts in the Second Space Age, or the ‘Orbital Age’, in which space is increasingly accessible to greater numbers and diversity of people and structures.
Events and Funding
The exhibition will be displayed in the UCL Anthropology foyer from June 7 to December 15, 2023, and will be accompanied by a series of talks and workshops to explore both the collection and the process and themes behind the project. This project has received funding from the IAS Octagon Small Grants Fund and constitutes a core component of my doctoral fieldwork as a member of the European Research Council-funded project ETHNO-ISS: An Ethnography of an Extraterrestrial Society.
For more information about the launch, follow @adryonsk and @UCLOuterSpace on Twitter and register here.
The Objects
The project will present a co-curated exhibition of objects and their biographies from the personal collections of space enthusiasts. Through the objects themselves, in addition to the process of interviewing contributors, curating the collection, and the experience of visitors engaging with the exhibition, enthusiasm is explored as a tangible social energy which can be embodied, circulated, and sensed through the physical world.
The research focuses on the personal, intimate, and entangled relationships between people, things, and space, via an emphasis on the journeys, histories, and social lives of the objects (the material culture of space enthusiasm). Objects can take any form―from the immaterial (such as VR environments, tweets, digital photographs, sound clips) to the material (such as journals, devices, mission patches, 3D-printed space wrenches).
adryonkozel.com 