The Martian Word for World is Mother (2022), Alice Bucknell
She/her — US/UK
Exhibition: Mutation
Wednesday 8 June till Sunday 19 June — Dokzaal
Opening | 17:00—23:00 (free admission)
Tue - Fri | 13:00—20:00
Sat & Sun | 10:00—20:00
Mon | closed
For decennia, many people wonder if we can live on Mars. Now that we are confronted on Earth with the far-reaching consequences of climate warming, speculations of living on Mars are packaged as possible futures. Partly due to the proposed exodus by tech-billionaires, the idea of terraforming Mars has entered the mainstream. Terraforming is the process of making the climate of a planet livable for human beings. But what does that process say about what we find livable and valuable on Earth? What can we learn from the speculation about life on Mars? In The Martian Word for World is Mother, a multi-channel video work by artist Alice Bucknell, such questions are both posed and answered.
Merging science-fiction strategies, 3D worldbuilding, plant magic, language AIs, and critiquing contemporary architectural proposals for the habitation of Mars, The Martian Word for World is Mother explores three Martian settlements with very different understandings of the Red Planet's future, and who gets to decide. The project is taking inspiration and themes from The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. This series describes in a scientific way the different stages of terraforming of the planet Mars and which fundamental cultural transformations humanity undergoes.
Key to Bucknell’s work is the problem of language and representation when speculating on Mars. The cultural imaginary of Mars across centuries and more recent renderings of carbon-neutral Martian megacities and terraforming proposals is loaded. Then, the language structures we currently have are insufficient to appropriately imagine possible futures for Mars that don’t recenter the human. The project wants to move away from an anthropocentric understanding of the Red Planet by reframing language as less a tool of communication than a type of shared affect, between past and future, humans and nonhuman kin.
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in London. She studied Anthropology and Visual Art at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London. Working primarily through video game engines, her current work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. She uses speculative fiction and worldbuilding strategies to critique architecture's role in the climate crisis and its contribution to systems of global inequality.
She has exhibited her video work internationally, most recently including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. Her writing appears regularly in art, architecture and design publications including Flash Art, Frieze, Harvard Design Magazine, Mousse, PIN-UP and The Architectural Review. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in MA Narrative Environments, part of the Spatial Practices program at Central Saint Martins.