OUMUAMUA _Gravity Escape
(...) It arrived on October 19, 2017. By that time, the flies had already disappeared and several swallows had collided with my bedroom window. October evenings were warm. Rick Deckard’s words brush softly my lips: ‘Sometimes to love someone, you got to be a stranger.’
Oumuamua_Gravity Escape is a choreographic installation that shifts the geo-centered human place-taking toward interplanetary scales and speeds. The work amplifies the history of site-sensitive practices by projecting the notion of place to outer space. It brings together speculative fiction, terraforming imaginaries, and the choreographer’s experiments on astroembodiments. Spotted in October 2017, Oumuamua is, according to NASA, the first confirmed interstellar body that moves through the Solar System. The work premiered in May 2021, when the vegetal and other organic lifeforms unfold in the northern hemisphere of the Earth.
The project is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Performing Arts Research Centre, TUTKE, Theatre Academy University of the Arts Helsinki.
Exploring Oumuamua produced a choreographic installation, in which I continue to examine the choreo-orientation with celestial bodies in space. According to NASA’s website: ‘The observations suggest this unusual object had been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system.’ In the project I interpret this object as an intergalactic queering body for its capacity to go beyond scientific classification and the perplexing way it moved through the Solar System.
