Lithuanian Space Agency comes back to Lithuania. From April 28 Planet of People will begin to form in Vilnius at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design.
Lithuanian Space Agency (LSA), founded by the artist-researcher Julijonas Urbonas, offers a thought experiment: to forget our earthbound origin for a moment and transfer our bodies to the cosmic void, where the special physical conditions would make the catapulted bodies attract each other and thus eventually form a new cosmic entity – a planet of people. The LSA laboratory, taking the form of an interactive architectural installation, is looking for answers about how this astrophysical fiction would be implemented, and what its social and political consequences could be. The central axis of the installation is a 3D scanner that scans human bodies and turns them into hypothetical bioarchitectural models. Visitors are invited to come into this custom-programmed device and get scanned in a choreographed pose of their choice. 3D images of the scanned bodies are transferred to an astrophysical simulation of one of the Lagrange points in space, while the installed screens show the forming lump and the visitors themselves as co-creators of a new cosmic body.
The project explores current aesthetic, ethical and political issues concerning space prevalent in existing national and commercial programmes such as cosmic culture and imagination, space colonialism and pollution, policies governing the space exploration activities, and the privatisation of outer space.
Earlier versions or installation elements of Planet of People have been presented at the Science Gallery in Dublin and Melbourne, Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Vartai Gallery in Vilnius, the Collective’s City Dome exhibition space in Edinburgh, and in 2021 represented Lithuania at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture. The version of the laboratory presented at the LNMA Museum of Applied Art and Design seeks to retain the original structure, scale, and content of the Venice display.
Lithuanian Space Agency: Planet of People
April 28 – November 20, 2023
LNMA Museum of Applied Arts and Design
Curator, artist Julijonas Urbonas
Architects Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture (Petras Išora and Ona Lozuraitytė)
Deployable structures designer Vladas Suncovas
Graphic designer, 3D scanner programming Studio Pointer* (Asya Sukhorukova and Jakob Schlötter)
Producer Mindaugas Reklaitis
Communication Jogintė Bučinskaitė
Printer machine programming Andrius Mikonis
Prototypes designer Paulius Vitkauskas
