Exhibition Text
Many names have been given to the remotest place in the ocean: “South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area” (SPOUA) defines it as furthest away from inhabited land. “Spacecraft Cemetery” describes the region as the designated crashing site for space debris. “Point Nemo” (Nemo=Nobody) suggests a point in “no man*’s land” and “Pole of Inaccessibility” refers to a location that matches the geographical criteria for physical unreachability.
These designations convey narratives that neither take non-human existences nor the destructive impact of human life on oceanic ecosystems into account. In this context “inaccessibility” implies a claim to potential (colonial) enclosure in the future.
The Pacific pole of inaccessibility is the starting point for the exhibition, which explores the condition of and anthropocentric approach to supposedly inaccessible places in the ocean and beyond.
With Ana Alenso, Eren Ileri, Dina Khouri, José Montealegre, Elisa Strinna. Galerie Im Turm, Berlin. 20 Jul–17 Sep 2023.
Pole der Unzugänglichkeit is the second part of the exhibition series Schwindel – conceptions of (extra)terrestrial worlds between reality and fiction.
About the work
The posterblock “Poles of Inaccessibility” functions as a link between Schwindel’s first two iterations. The poster reveals that the consequences of human activities in the cosmos can be found in seemingly inaccessible places in the ocean.
“They say Point Nemo is ‘lifeless.’ How ‘lifeless’ is it? As ‘lifeless’ as planet Mars or the vacuum of space? Samples collected from Point Nemo indicated it had around 26 microplastic particles per cubic meter. In some parts of the North Atlantic and Mediterranean, this number is between 180-307 particles per cubic meter. […] How many spacecraft lie down there at the bottom of Point Nemo? Do spacecraft remnants merge with microplastics from a detergent bottle? Will the International Space Station be put to the grave at Point Nemo? How many space stations are too many for a spacecraft cemetery?”
From Berlin Art Link
“The exhibition’s title draws from Eren Ileri’s research on space debris: spacecraft that are no longer operational and get discarded into graveyard orbits, though at times re-enter the atmosphere and land back on Earth. Ileri’s work, printed on A1-sized posters exhibited at the gallery’s entrance as a sculptural piece and free for everyone to grab a copy of, dwells on the so-called “Spacecraft Cemetery”—a site in the South Pacific Ocean where defunct satellites are usually crashed. It roughly coincides with Point Nemo and the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, regarded as the remotest place on Earth and the farthest from inhabited land. Ileri’s chronological treatise constitutes the link between the first two episodes of the series, retracing the very downward motion of a space crash.”