COSS Call for Contributors and Curators: Exhibition of Space Enthusiasm

Adryon Kozel, a second-year PhD student in Anthropology, is looking for contributors and curators for a collaborative exhibition on objects of space enthusiasm. This will take the form of an interactive, dynamic website and a 4-6 week in-person exhibition hosted at UCL in October-November 2022. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of talks and workshops to explore both the collection and the process and themes behind the project.

This project will present a co-curated exhibition of objects and their biographies from the personal collections of space enthusiasts. Through the objects themselves, in addition to the process of interviewing contributors, curating the collection, and the experience of visitors engaging with the exhibition, enthusiasm is explored as a tangible social energy. This allows the personal relationships of people to space to shine through, via an emphasis on the journeys, histories, and social lives of the objects (or material culture of space enthusiasm). Objects can take any form―from the immaterial (such as VR environments, tweets, digital photographs, and sound clips) to the material (such as journals, devices, mission patches, and 3D-printed space wrenches).

This is a collaborative project! Get involved in two ways:

1. Become a contributor! Have an object that you think tells a great story about your relationship to spaceflight? We’d love to hear about it and display it in the exhibition (online and/or in-person). Objects loaned to the project will be returned in November, all shipping costs paid.
2. Become a co-curator! If you have a little more time and would be interested in becoming more involved in the shaping of this exhibition and the anthropological/research process behind it, please get in touch. Curators have the opportunity to significantly shape the themes of the exhibition, the design, and the associated events.

If you want to hear more, please contact Adryon (adryon.kozel.18@ucl.ac.uk) via email or Twitter (@adryonsk).

The Centre for Outer Space Studies (COSS) was founded in 2019 to promote research and teaching related to the social study of Outer Space and our relationship to the cosmos and the planet.

This project has received funding from the IAS Octagon Small Grant scheme and constitutes part of Adryon’s doctoral fieldwork as a member of the European Research Council-funded project ETHNO-ISS: An Ethnography of an Extraterrestrial Society.