Sporae Vita
Installation, 2020
Commissioned by Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for the exhibition “Mars. The Red Mirror”

Sporae Vita is a theory-fiction research project about how technoscientific institutions define the meaning and mission of life and humanity while deploying and constraining certain ideas of progress.

The project presents both an object of study situated in a world-yet-to-come and an investigation into it. The installation is composed of two posters. The first describes a post-collapse civilisation that has restored life to the planet through bio- and geo-engineering and its consequent myths. Sporae Vita is the space agency of this world. Its goal is to create the conditions for life to flourish on other planets: it sends humans who have been merged with a machine created by Sporae Vita to inhabit Mars, while it systematically communicates the agency’s technological and scientific achievements.

The second poster displays the results of a Science and Technology Studies research study completed on Sporae Vita. A diagram illustrates how the space agency, as a critical infrastructure, reproduces civilisational myths through scientific programmes and demonstrations. By doing so, Sporae Vita identifies as desirable certain forms of knowledge (and therefore discriminates against others); indirectly regulates the residual inertia of the technocapitalist society that caused the original collapse; and finally organises a particular shared experience of time.

Design by Marina Martinez

Flows of Technopolitical Realisation. Portals, Venture Capitals and Economy-Fiction

Workshop, 2020
Commissioned by Hangar, Barcelona

ENGINEERING FICTION