2017 – Present
As of April 9, 2020, a total of 563 reached Earth orbit and therefore had a chance to see our Earth as a distant object, positioned in space. One of them is the Dutch physicist and astronaut Wubbo Ockles who in his speech, broadcast on the Dutch national TV station in May 2014, described Earth as a sick and a lonely planet, where “most of the people are not aware of the danger we live in”. His last wish, and we can say last because he died the day after this speech was delivered, was to transfer his experience to us.
With her work, Marija Šujica ask the question: How can a body, a living medium, be a memorial and therefore an object that commemorates an act such as seeing Earth as a distant object? What happens when everything we know; all human history is seen at real physical distance? What kind of love develops with this detachment?
With these questions in mind Marija developed the work that is a possible way to imagine what life would be like without gravity, a metaphor for the gravity of the situation that we all are facing.
Astronaut in Me is an audio tour that provides a unique guidance through the space, designed to amplify sensitivity towards gravity, re-imagine the experience of being in space and to refine individual capacity for self-distancing.
At the same time, it is a proposal of particular kind of intimacy known only to a handful of people. This intimacy is a well-known phenomenon of ecstatic feeling experienced by astronauts when seeing Earth as a distant object.