Friday 20 May 2022
Find your Place in Space
We propose a sonic escape from the earth with the poet and composer Félicia Atkinson; and the rewriting of electronic music from Natalia Piñuel’s perspective of gender and non-binary identities. An event that serves as the closing of the exhibition Repair Manuals and Cosmic Sounds in which we will also be accompanied by its curators, Magui Dávila and Maite Muñoz.
Find your place in the space is a subtitle that appeared on the cover of one of the first editions of The Whole Earth Catalog. In 1966, its editor Stewart Brand asked himself the LSD-inspired question: “Why haven’t we ever seen a picture of the whole Earth?” and printed posters and buttons that he sent to NASA members and handed out at universities. The USA and Russia already had the means to take and publish these images, and Buckminster Fuller had spoken of the importance of the idea of the Earth as an interconnected sphere in order to raise awareness of community and eco-social responsibility. In 1967, the first colour image of the whole earth was published; who knows, perhaps it was because of Brand’s influence! That image became the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog starting with its first issue and forever changed the paradigm of our perception of the Earth and the space surrounding it.
Finding a place in the universe has also been an idea promoted by Afrofuturistic sonic fiction, seeking a new planet where the black race can thrive. In 1971, Sun Ra taught the course “The Black Man in the Cosmos” at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the course of his visits to California, Sun Ra drew the attention of Jim Newman, who produced the film Space Is the Place in 1974.
