Licking Meteorites and a Pharmacy of un•Earthing

In this text, I discuss my recent artistic work with meteorites in relation to possible future schemes to exploit non-terrestrial resources. Meteorites have been entangled with human cultures for thousands of years, from tool-making to religious practices, in scientific research and as commodities in online-markets. Whereas space mining has been a staple of Science Fiction narratives for over a century, national legislations have recently started to allow for actual future extraction and commercial use of resources on other celestial bodies. By employing the conceptual framework of "un center dot Earthing" as a transdisciplinary approach to explore existing and potential transformations of humans by and in outer space, I approach meteorites and their current commodification as a "pre-enactment" of these possible future scenarios of interplanetary extractivism. In collaboration with the Institute of Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Vienna, I produced pharmaceutical products containing meteoritic material and documented the process as well as my performative attempts to approach non-terrestrial material. The resulting short film raises questions about meteorites as a pharmakon of the ambivalent processes of un center dot Earthing and human-non-earthly relations.