Space Tangle

Space Tangle brings together three distinct works by artist Dr Sarah Fortais: Cosmic Debris, Cosmic Flock, and Lunga 6. Cosmic Debris will also become the setting for the site-specific vocal work Fragments, composed and performed by Filament Theatre. These works all explore the often-hidden entanglements between people, place, animals, and materials that shape how we imagine and make future worlds. Using outer space, the ultimate landscape of possibility, imagination, and future-thinking, Fortais asks us to consider what is overlooked: our relationship to waste, to the discarded, the backgrounded, the unnoticed. What about the animals? What of the materials that gain new value under different conditions?

Since 1999, the United Nations General Assembly has recognised October 4-10th of each year as World Space Week; an international celebration focussing on how science and technology can better humanity. UCL’s newly commissioned artwork Cosmic Debris and exhibition Space Tangle will form one of over 16,000 events taking place across 83 nations for World Space Week. The 2025 theme for World Space Week is Living in Space.

Cosmic Debris presents 280 cast hands suspended into a meteoric installation, temporarily frozen in orbit. The artwork aims to cause a chain-reaction (or Kessler effect) of knowledge sharing, inspiring future researchers to learn more about how we can responsibly manage space debris. In Cosmic Flock, Fortais collects debris from east London and repurposes it into spacesuits for sheep. In doing so, she invites us to see waste differently, not as useless, but as a vital substance. Lunga 6 presents works created during Fortais’ time as the artist-in-residence on the UK’s first analogue space research mission.

Fortais’ work is bricolage, and involves collecting, taking things apart, jamming them together, and rebuilding. Using a language of construction which emphasises provisionality and obvious connections between individual parts is important to Fortais. The creative and transformative power that outer space holds for Fortais rests in how it changes the way we perceive our materials on Earth. Through speculative assemblage and material re-framing, Space Tangle brings into focus the overlooked networks and forgotten agents that shape our collective planetary and extraterrestrial futures.

To RSVP to the drinks reception and panel discussion on Thursday October 9th, click here.