Licking Meteorites and a Pharmacy of un·Earthing
Licking Meteorites and a Pharmacy of un·Earthing

Summary/Abstract: In this text, I discuss my recent artistic work with meteorites in relation to possiblefuture schemes to exploit non-terrestrial resources. Meteorites have been entangled withhuman cultures for thousands of years, from tool-making to religious practices, in scientificresearch and as commodities in online-markets. Whereas space mining has been a staple ofScience Fiction narratives for over a century, national legislations have recently started to allowfor actual future extraction and commercial use of resources on other celestial bodies.By employing the conceptual framework of “un·Earthing” as a transdisciplinary approach toexplore existing and potential transformations of humans by and in outer space, I approachmeteorites and their current commodification as a “pre-enactment” of these possible futurescenarios of interplanetary extractivism. In collaboration with the Institute of PharmaceuticalTechnologies at the University of Vienna, I produced pharmaceutical products containing meteoriticmaterial and documented the process as well as my performative attempts to approachnon-terrestrial material. The resulting short film raises questions about meteorites as a

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