Alien Landscape

Alien Landscapes is an artistic research project that brings together visual arts, photography, sound, astronomy, biology and biofabrication to ask how technologies of representation mediate our experience of landscape and how we construct images of places we cannot access directly, such as Mars.

The project begins with a discomfort: it seems easier to imagine life on Mars than a future on Earth. Everything we know about Mars reaches us through machines: photographs, maps, sounds and data produced by rovers, satellites and other instruments. The project examines the ways of seeing embedded in these technologies and links them to a long history of exploration, classification and prospecting carried out by colonial and naturalist expeditions, which portrayed territories as unknown, empty or available for exploitation.

This question led us to the Salar de Pajonales, a salt flat in the Atacama Desert selected by NASA as a terrestrial analog for Mars due to its extreme aridity, high ultraviolet radiation, hypersalinity and low temperatures. Technologies designed to detect signs of life were tested there before being sent to the red planet. In some sense, those machines carry a memory of the Atacama.