As life on Planet Earth slowly deteriorated, measures to alleviate the burden of trash reached a point of no return. Humans attempted to eject their waste into space on rockets carelessly and without any understanding of its implication. In the year 2100, the planet was destroyed, and the remaining human species boarded spaceships to escape the uninhabitable environment. We began roaming the void in fragmented hoards, attempting to stop off on other planets in order to find a new home. When we were exiled by the beings we encountered at every turn, humans became cosmic refugees, abandoning hope of ever finding a new home planet. […] Full of remorse and heartbreak for the planet they all knew they only had one of as they destroyed it, they began a species-wide campaign to recover the floating rockets full of trash that now litter the universe in an act of repentance and as a gesture of a newly found respect for life’s landscape.
After 500 years of completing trash recovery missions, there are no living humans that have experienced life on earth left. A group of their descendants decides to present the records, catalogs, and scholarly denunciation of their past evils to the Interplanetary Court of Appeals. As a form of penance, they present their intention to create Earthships out of the recycled material they have foraged throughout the universe. The Earthships are to serve as memorials to their lost planet, and monuments to planetary protection and conservation.
The meaning of these Earthships differs in impact depending on the being experiencing it. On the sliding scale of memorials and monuments, humans typically interact with and perceive these spaces as memorials, whereas the beings native to the planet understand them as monuments. To the beings that experience the Earthships on their home planet, they are otherworldly, spiritual, experiences of alien life; life on a lost planet light-years away. The weight of this encounter prompts the viewer to consider that their planet too could disappear as easily as Earth did if they forget the events and systems that led humanity to its current fate. […] To the humans that complete pilgrimages to and build these multitudes of structures across the galaxy, they are a somber encounter with the beauty they destroyed. The kaleidoscopic walls made of polished bottles and tires we collected inspire a spiritual experience as well, except under a more reflective tone in which humans can either imagine what life on Earth might have felt like, or grieve the stolen opportunity of having a home planet. These monuments to environmentalism will therefore simultaneously serve as memorials to life on Earth by asking both audiences to sit and reflect on what beauty in the natural world is to them.
These sprawling Earthships are also an invitation to imagine what life on another planet might have been like, a space to dream up a complex and striking world. The ships are a galactic human apology to future generations and the being of all for the horrifying selfishness and entitlement they displayed by launching their trash into space and all past evils they perpetrated on planet Earth.
