The Universe Makers

The project The Universe Makers is the result of two-year research on space imagery and is presented as an enquiry on representative patterns and figurative models upon which our pop culture psyche bases and which still nowadays profoundly influence our attitudes toward the scientific and the outer space. Through this body of work, I wanted to explore the character photography, technology, science fiction and other media that have played in producing evidences that still address our collective imagery towards beliefs, fake conceptions and constructed scenarios.

The future of civilization is certainly a matter of concern for humanity: from the appearance on TV of the First Man on the Moon in 1969, to the recent mission of Mars ONE promising to inaugurate a permanent human settlement on Mars, the possibility of life beyond Earth has established itself concretely in our minds. Documents and visual records collected over the past years from Institutions and Research Centres have had a fundamental role in providing us with vivid depictions of the remote universe and realistic proofs of space exploration’s feasibility. On the other hand, science fiction massively contributed, in setting up our idea of an outward infinite galaxy, waiting for us to be explored, studied and colonized, suggesting situations in between the bizarre and the truth.