Before the ecosystem collapsed completely, The Monument Project has carefully preserved the last living plants from each continent, and is planning to bring these pieces of nature to Mars and foster them there. Since the Martian surface is unsuitable for earth plants to grow, the committee has decided to put the plants in an airtight glass terrarium, a forest enclosed in its own little world. Inside the terrarium, the environment would be just like that of the Earth: there would be ample oxygen, moist, soil, and fertilizer to keep the plants alive. While there is no more life on Earth, there is still air, water, and soil, so people could still go back and bring back resources like these to keep this terrarium alive.
As a member of the Monument Project, I proposed to theme the terrarium as the “Enchanted” Terrarium, inspired by the Enchanted Rose from the Disney story Beauty and the Beast. In the story, the Enchanted Rose is a mystical flower offered to a prince by an old beggar woman, in return for shelter from the cold. Turned away by the prince and seeing that there was no love in his heart, she cast a spell on him that transformed him into a hideous beast. She left the rose in a glass cloche, promising that it would bloom until the beast’s twenty-first year. If he could learn to love before the last petal fell, the spell would be broken and he would turn back into the human price that he once was. If not, he will be doomed to remain a beast forever.
I hope the terrarium to reflect the theme of the “curse and hope” in the Disney story. Just like the Beast, the humans are punished for their mistake of destroying the environment on earth for their selfish needs. Just like the rose with the charm, the plants inside the terrarium have a clock running down on their life due to the limited resources they have in the terrarium. Just like how the Enchanted Rose teaches the Beast how to love, the Enchanted Terrarium teaches humans how to preserve and protect nature. To keep this small ecosystem to survive on a foreign planet, the current Martian inhabitants must learn to take good care of it, which includes constantly bring resources that they need from Earth.
A living monument to commemorate the loss of our once-intact ecosystem on earth, the Enchanted Terrarium reflects on the importance of environmental preservation and the respect for nature. The cultural and social legacy of our life-world is visually articulated through the theme of Disney and the emphasis on the rose.
The notion of “memory” is in play with the Disney theme – it has an element of childhood nostalgia, which echoes the nostalgia for Earth, the deeper theme of the monument. Moreover, the fact that Martian inhabitants are still being influenced by a Disney movie shows that culture have played, and will continue to play, a significant role in the way we perceive the world around us. The beauty of the image and scent of the rose would render people to stand in awe and be moved to cherish it, and the rich culture behind the rose allows people to take pieces of human history to another planet. The notion of “memory” is once again in play here, as taking something from the past and plant it for the future is an act of remembrance in itself.
