École doctorale 20 Constellations d'imaginaires spaciaux : repenser nos liens à l'Espace et à la Terre par l'étude des récits alternatifs du Cosmos Constellation of spatial imaginaries: rethinking our links to Space and the Earth thought the study of alternative narratives of the Cosmos: introduction

  • type: Article
  • ref: DOC.2024.25

At the dawn of a new space age (Pasco, 2017), we are witnessing a return to the enthusiasm for the conquest of the stars. This takes shape in a technological momentum with the arrival on the front of the stage of private agencies such as SpaceX, which advocates a vision of space focused on exploration in order to "come to the aid of humanity. (Davenport, 2018). In parallel, new politico-military rivalries between emerging public space agencies, generating space races, recently towards Mars (Sourbès-Verger, 2022).
On the other hand, the awareness of the uniqueness of our planet Earth leads some artists and philosophers to conceive other spatial narratives  (Aït-Touati, 2022). These, modeled among other things by the climatic context, challenge the dominant narratives by proposing anti-capitalist and non-anthropocentric forms of relationship to the cosmos. Without systematically falling into the utopia of a return to nature or an exclusion from space travel, these stories reappropriate and speculate on other spatial possibilities.
From a selected corpus of texts and artistic and philosophical works, the project aims to answer the following questions: in the face of hegemonic narratives and representations of the cosmos, what types of alternatives exist? How are these alternatives and what are their characteristics? How do we make these other voices heard so that they fill the plurality of our representation of the cosmos?
To answer it, it will be a question, from a theoretical point of view, of building a model which can take into account both the spatial reality and the dominant and alternative imaginaries which relate to it and from a societal point of view, to propose an alternative to the Outer Space Treaty. Artistic and citizen in nature, it will take the form of a poetic textual production, presented within a multimedia installation called Library of Spatial Imaginaries.