Cosmos Falling

Cosmos Falling includes works by Xin Liu, (The White Stone, 2021); Lawrence Lek (Geomancer, 2017); Yuyan Wang (The Moon Also Rises, 2023); and Angela Su (Cosmic Call, 2019), which employ pseudo-documentary and speculative fiction as filmic techniques to re-animate the afterlives of technical objects, while also questioning an aesthetics of failure that surrounds the cosmic, technological frontier. From missiles, rockets, comets, satellites, to artificial moons, each narrates what has been left in their wake and what emerges in the terrestrial ruin. Bordering on science fiction with Sinofuturist underpinnings that push beyond cyberpunk tropes, these works also enact a kind of embodied performativity between various bodies and subjectivities that reflect a reverse trajectory: falling from the heavens, cosmic frontier, lower orbit, sky, back to earth. 

For centuries, humans have built worlds and cities on top of the ruins of the old ones. Now, we are entering an age where civilization is building a world at the highest point from the planet's surface, the lower Earth orbit. In The White Stone, Xin Liu (b. 1991 Xinjiang, based in London) postulates a future history of rocket debris abandonment and recovery through a “hunt” for abandoned rocket debris in remote areas. The protagonist sets off across valleys and villages and into the desert in the southwest of China in a search for the debris of rockets fallen since the 1990s. Shifting our gaze from the sky back to the ground, this filmic work reexamines the life span of technologies, marking the terrestrial death of an extraterrestrial object.