Every peak is a crater is a multidisciplinary project rooted in the landscapes of the Arctic Circle. It considers the implications of imaging those landscapes in allaying climate fears and in the romance of humanist expansion projects (Martian Manifest Destiny). The word “romance” suggests an examination of the metaphor, the story, the seductiveness of the violent myths and narratives used to justify colonialist expansion. “Every peak is a crater” interrogates the new manifest destiny of Mars settlement through parallels in the myth of Hercules and its political origins, told through poetics and queer desire.
The project brings sculpture, drawing, and video practices into dialogue with object-oriented political/environmental concerns built around Ann Carson’s 1998 retelling of Hercules’ 10th labor in verse. Its primary characters are Hercules, an American astronaut/scientist, and Geryon, a mythical red-winged being that was slain by Hercules as his tenth labor. The role of Geryon will be played by tardigrades collected from the cryoconite holes that dot the surface of the Arctic Circle’s glacier ice- the only place where life grows on the polar ice caps. The setting of their abstracted romance will be the land and seascapes of the arctic.
The resilient tardigrade is our sacrificial proxy in research to enable human survival in space and in the pursuit to colonize Mars. Based on recent studies, the environmental factors in these landscapes and in these Arctic and Antarctic territories could be considered the closest to what we believe life would be like on other planets.