Minna Pöllänen
Tender Orbits

October 8th 2017 SpaceX debris washes ashore in Hatteras Village, N.C, USA

'Local authorities and others are generally describing the object as a slab of aeronautical debris...It is curved and shows signs of tearing along one edge...It does not appear to have been in the water for too long as there are not a lot of barnacles.'

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The hundreds of millions of pieces of space junk orbiting the earth consist mainly of obsolete or malfunctioned remains of man-made communication, surveillance, and war technologies such as communication, spy and weather satellites, rocket parts, and fragments of anti-missile or anti-satellite weaponry. In space, space junk is distant waste, but when it falls back to earth it becomes something else: a relic carrying the marks of an altogether different type of erosion, speed, and time. The few people who come across space junk like to touch it. Some pose with a touch signifying possession of the found object. Others linger at its side, stealing a touch. The encounters share an awkwardness which I find interesting. How should I be with this object? More broadly, how does this encounter open on to our thinking and relations to objects we call waste?

In this practice-based research project space junk is both a material metaphor and a central concept. I make sculptural interpretations of space junk from off-cuts of industrially processed wood. These are accompanied by space blankets that carry machine embroidered outlines of the debris on them. Like space junk the second-hand and off-cut materials used in the work orbit between material, object and waste.

The research develops a new type of temporal relationality between audience and sculptural objects termed as 'probing physicality' by encouraging touch as a mode of encountering the sculptural work. By steering away from the 'nextness' (Massumi) of interactivity, the intersubjectivity of participation, and the sensorially loaded environments of immersive installation practices the research posits the encounter with the object as central.

A ruptured fuel tank is about care across the scale, from the individual descent of the component-part to the mass of space junk circulating in 'graveyard orbits'. By utilising forms and materials related to space junk, I explore what Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel and Maan Barua describe as unloved others: things we might not think about or want to care for.

What and how do we encounter through an object an artist has named space junk?

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https://www.newsobserver.com/n...

Ginn, F. Beisel, U. and Barua, M.; Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness,Vulnerability, Killing. In: Environmental Humanities 1 May 2014; 4 (1): 113–123.