The Russian and US film industries have recently engaged in a rivalry over the release of a film in which some scenes were shot on the International Space Station (ISS). Although the ISS has often served as a model in various film scenarios since its launch in 1998, this is the first time that film crews have had the privilege of going inside one of the modules to rotate in weightlessness. At the same time as space tourism, which has become accessible to the wealthy of our planet, popular cinema will soon offer moviegoers the chance to see their star evolve in a unique setting located about 400 km above our heads.
On the Russian side, the main role of the film was entrusted to Yulia Peressild, while, in the United States, it is Tom Cruise who is the star. By a few days ahead of the American production and by favoring a woman in the main role, the Russians commemorate in a way the feat of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman astronaut to find herself, in 1963, around the Earth on board of the spaceship Vostok 6. Following this flight into low orbit, carried out two years after Yuri Gagarin’s feat, Tereshkova will become the standard-bearer of the Soviet regime and the symbol of women’s liberation in the socialist world. This means that the rivalry with the United States, symbolized by the term “cold war”, was also transposed to the field of the superiority of the Soviet regime in terms of the emancipation of women, whose objective seems to be the release of tasks assigned to the domestic space.
But, it must be admitted, this Soviet propaganda on feminist modernity remained under the prerogative of state authoritarianism. Thus, on both sides, these two regimes with opposing political ideologies demonstrated, at their beginnings, little enthusiasm for the presence of women in space. In the United States, the Mercury 13 project, whose goal in 1961 was to train 13 women to go to the Moon, was quickly shelved by NASA. Despite the statistical data that demonstrated the equality of women to undertake this type of mission, this project could not be completed. In the history of the conquest of space, we remember the adventure of Apollo, this program which offered the chance to 12 men to walk on the Moon. Consequently, the politico-military rivalry between these two superpowers too often puts on hold other aspects of our ability to imagine our relationship to the extraterrestrial world. Certainly, fundamental research on the origin of the universe, supposedly neutral, will always be important, but can’t the aspiration to imagine the cosmos generate other possible visions relying on diverse cultural sensitivities?
Often confined to visions dictated by military and commercial interests, the history of space programs seems, indeed, restricted to the imperial and economic domination of the world’s superpowers. It is on a completely different horizon that this dossier of the journal has been drawn up. SPACE contemporary art. Entitled Spatial feminism, it brings together different texts aimed at repopulating the spatial imagination with artistic projects constructed from feminist perspectives. He relies on artistic approaches that denounce, from multiple perspectives, all forms of imperialism and colonialism in terms of space exploration. Under the guidance of a uniform discourse on the conquest of space, these works mainly criticize an extraterrestrial world which would only reflect the socio-political situation of our planet with its excessive inequalities, its deep disagreements in the aspirations of some vis-à-vis others and our ways of dreaming the universe. Long imagined according to myths and legends, today confronted with the results of scientific research based on data from powerful astronomical telescopes, space nevertheless remains, as underlined by the person in charge of this file, Marie-Pier Boucher, “a critical territory that presents itself to us as an invitation to reconsider the present and the future of contemporary terrestrial societies”.
In this perspective, the works of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, by Carey Young, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Hito Steyerl or Nuotama Frances Bodomo imagine the reconquest of interstellar space through artistic proposals that diverge from the dominant discourse. Precisely, in his short film Afronauts (2014), Bodomo, a Ghanaian filmmaker living in New York, tells a colorful anecdote, reminiscent of a 1964 Moon travel program by a member of the Zambian resistance and featuring a young woman astronaut seventeen years old. Despite the improbable aspect of this program, this account also evokes, as the author Namwali Serpell mentions, “an ironic attempt to criticize and satirize Western imperialism”.
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