“Mars. The red mirror ”confronts us with what is happening on Earth. The human being’s need to imagine and create, as well as the inherent impulse to want to colonize other worlds and dominate them, are evident in the many books, private collections, comics, videos and other pieces in this exhibition.
“Red star, telluric god, favorite planet of science fiction, ancestral symbol, wayward archetype, metaphor of the vertiginous present-future”: Juan Insua, curator of the exhibition Marte. The red mirror *. Barcelona.
At the beginning of the tour, an object communicates in the first person with the observer. Its label reads: “I am a rare stone. Call me KSAR Ghilane 002 or whatever your imagination prefers ”. His first words open the way to the creative and the scientific. Later, he tells that it comes from the deepest strata of Mars and that it has roamed space for thousands of years, and in the end praises the insatiable curiosity of our species, which found it in the Sahara desert and classified it as what it is. : a meteorite fragment. This rare stone is among the first objects to receive visitors from Mars. The red mirror , an exhibition of the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).
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Is it possible that we have ever played with a meteorite without knowing it? In the exhibition there is the certainty that this is not just any stone on the road, since it has been in space, where the human being has searched and continues to search for answers. And right now it does it on Mars, in a specific way, which has been the inspiration of writers, scientists, filmmakers and artists, which has become the obsession of billionaires, in the new Moon for the powers of Earth. “The exhibition invites us to recover the fascination for a myth that is synonymous with violence and death, but that also protects the harvest and inaugurates spring,” writes Judit Carrera, director of the CCCB, in the book published on the occasion of this event.
Mars is one of our most famous neighbors, where right now we are trying to determine if there was life with unmanned missions, such as NASA’s Perseverance Rover. On Twitter, @NASAPersevere has 2.7 million followers and says his hobbies are photography and collecting rocks. The most famous planet in science fiction and the most studied by scientists, it has been in the news frequently since 2020. On May 15, the Chinese probe, Tianwen-1, which means “questions to the sky”, landed there and four days later his Martian rover, Zhurong, sent the first images of the terrain. Some Earthlings might feel relief, peace, perhaps illusion, when looking at photos of what is happening in space and looking towards Mars with hope, even with their feet on Earth. In any case, scientific, mythological, creative and financial issues, among others, arise in the route and in the events around Mars. The exhibition is curated by Juan Insua, director of the CCCBLab, a department dedicated to research and innovation in culture.
We already know that Martians will not invade Earth, as in HG Wells’s War of the Worlds (at least, they don’t). Now we humans are the ones who want to get to Mars, find out if there was life, if there could be such, just in case in the future the move would be obligatory.
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Mars. The red mirror confronts us with what is happening on Earth. The human being’s need to imagine and create, as well as the inherent impulse to want to colonize other worlds and dominate them, are evident in the many books, private collections, comics, videos and other pieces in this exhibition. There are more than 400 objects that tell the story of our bond with this planet, from the ancient cosmos, through Mediterranean cultures, feminism, pop culture, ongoing research projects and the expectations of humans with future discoveries. .
The photographs of its lands are not alien to our imagination: a desert, a ghostly landscape and without vegetation are a mirror of what we have done in our own home, giving way to the urgency to save what we have, to heal what we have damaged. and take care of what we have left. Apparently, and according to various studies, Mars was not always like that, arid, desert and desolate, let’s hope that in the future the same will not be said about Earth.
* The exhibition Mars. The red mirror is open until next July 11.
