Space Junk

Space Junk is an artistic intervention in the form of a design fiction. Set in 2044, the piece evokes a near future in which space debris removal systems have developed along the same lines as container redemption and recycling systems.

Composed of docu-fiction and speculative artifacts, Space Junk is a multi-media piece that invites the public to contemplate the quotidian fault lines built into an imagined space debris retrieval system. This fictional infrastructure is built on insights developed through four years of ethnographic research by Hegel on waste picker (recycler/canner) livelihoods and advocacy in New York City.

The piece addresses questions around the meanings of, access to, and control over discard, including the challenges of governance, corporate control, and the nature of autonomous livelihoods in late capitalism. It also incites us to consider shared responsibilities of care for the commons. Simultaneously, these speculations trouble the fantasy that discards can ever truly go ‘away’, even in the vast away of the solar system and beyond.

Funded by grants from Sure We Can, Dyson Summer Research Intiative