Our personal belongings are integral to how we cultivate and make sense of our myriad individual and social identities. Complex, occasionally contradictory, and intimate, our relationship to our things can be unconscious and under-examined, yet help form the foundations of our beliefs, behaviours, and practices in the world.

This co-curated ethnographic exhibition gathers together a selection of objects and their biographies from the personal belongings of space enthusiasts. Through the journeys, histories, and social lives of the objects themselves, in addition to the process of collaboratively designing and producing the exhibition, enthusiasm is explored as a social force or substance that can be observed and quantified as it touches each person’s life and relationships. Our aim is to make tangible and visible these energies that flow between people, between places, between times, that are fundamentally important to the production of multiplanetary personal and social identities, the maintenance and social world-building of the space community, and the prefigurative political project of creating futures.

This exhibition asks how one incorporates outer space into their everyday life by centring mundane yet precious objects which embody, represent, and facilitate dreams, beliefs, and experiences which bring space and possible futures closer to home. These objects are embedded in the everyday, perpetual, processual work of orienting oneself spatially and temporally as a human in the universe. Collectively, they provide a kaleidoscopic, fragmented, incomplete, and messy glimpse into the material, embodied practices of cultivating both a planetary and multiplanetary subjectivity. As more than one contributor to this collection pointed out in their interviews, we are already in space.