This section foregrounds the creative and narrative work that goes into producing and memorialising history.
The objects on display obscure temporal delineations, looking back upon the present from the perspective of a future historian, or by bringing the past into the present. These physical and digital objects, which include both the tools and products of photographers and filmmakers, seem to occupy multiple moments in time simultaneously .
Photographer Mackenzie Calle excavates and reimagines NASA’s hidden queer histories through imaginative reconstructions of astronaut Sally Ride’s professional and private desks.
Moving forward in time, the creative ethnographic films of Australian anthropologists Ceridwen Dovey and Rowena Potts cast a nostalgic eye on the 23-year-old International Space Station as it nears its final years, and explore the intangible quality and magnetic pull of ‘space-flown’ objects.
Lastly, this section includes some of the professional materials of launch photographers Julia Bergson and Cooper Hime, who each track different aspects of SpaceX’s launches from different landscapes: Bergson on Florida’s Space Coast and Hime at the Starbase Facility in Brownsville, Texas. Bergson’s private journal faithfully tracks of the movements of the SpaceX fleet over the years between Cape Canaveral and the Atlantic Ocean, where the ships collect used rocket boosters and capsules that have returned from the ISS–containing either cargo or astronauts returning home. Hime’s camera lens was smashed while recording the first orbital launch attempt of the SpaceX Starship, the largest rocket ever built. The launch, unexpectedly violent, destroyed its launch pad and sent chunks of concrete flying, one of which smashed into the camera placed 700 feet away to capture the launch.