Xuanyi Wang // CAPSULE: A CREATED TIME-SPACE

Millions of years after the Great Collision compelled humans to leave Earth, a group of Neo-humans living on the new planet found the last space capsule that once brought humans across the universe on their last trips. Earth and the life on it were the tales of nostalgia held by Neo-humans who had ever seen Earth and never would. To commemorate Earth that only exists in legends and ancestors’ memories, neo-humans built a monument based on the space capsule, which embodied the human culture rooted in Neo-human civilization that helped to identify who they are.

The monument keeps the original form of the space capsule to be a giant cone-shaped architect, while the inner space is cleared out and replaced with an exhibition hall. Two parts compose the exhibition: the simulated ecosystem at the center (Earth Room) and the surrounding mirrored corridors (Infinite Corridor).

The exhibition restoring the ecosystem is constituted by the replicas of soils, rocks, water, and air created according to reliable historical recordings and scientists’ imaginations. By doing so, the curators wish to freeze and store Earth’s time in this tiny space as a historic cache. The visitors are expected to be the participants of the scenario, as if the replicas of Earth people interacting with the ecosystem. Thus, the exhibition becomes a stage of the immersive theater where the visitors revive the memories of Earth. The design of the monument indicates an analogy of history-writing, which molds the form of the temporal past that is gone forever and fills in with the reinterpretations directed by subjective perspectives.

The surrounding corridors form an infinite loop with mirrors wrapping the whole inner space throughout walls, ceilings, and floors. The visitors see the reflections of the simulated ecosystem and themselves overlapped, where the embodied past and present are also mingled to disturb the clear causal timeline. The historical perspective is like this mirrored space, through which the past becomes an n-dimensional space, framed by layers of reflections and presenting the ever-changing eternity along with the motions of the agencies.

The exhibition might be a response to how humans would imagine the future/past people imagining them, engaging with some ideas of historiography: the multi-perspective historical narratives, the subjectivity of agencies, and creating history as a “living sculpture,” constructed out of the original bodies of the temporal past and revived by constant reinterpretations.