The earth is a satellite of the moon

With fiction, imagination and irony, this projects talks about Latin American satellites and sovereignty to think about today's world.

The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon is a photographic tribute to Latin American satellites and the ability to dream.

What is a satellite for? What does it mean symbolically and culturally? Among other uses, satellites observe the earth to provide images. They can show the severity of an oil spill, they allow us to see how human beings modify geographical space over time. To date, North American companies have sent 4,300 satellites into space, while Argentina, the country where I come from, has sent 11 satellites in its entire history. In order to create a global satellite internet network, with its consequent monopoly in technological terms, the large internet services of the global north seek to sell their service to the countries of the South American region at a very high cost while polluting the land with thousands of satellites.

Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's theory of the fictional bag, the project proposes a different way of narrating, based on the methaphor of bags in the history of the humanity: something to hold water, seeds, food, whatever has been collected instead of the use of weapons and sharp objets. With a political view of the imagination, I am interested in mixing photography and fiction to think about new perspectives within documentary photography.

The project seeks to reflect on the notion of collective dream that these devices that fly through the sky represent for some territories. Investigates how Latin American countries have been creating their first satellites in recent years with the intention of generating better connectivity conditions and images for the territory.

The title of the project comes from a poem by Nicaraguan revolutionary author Leonel Rugama, written in 1968, where he reflects on the cost of space missions by neoliberal countries while their territory is being extractivized by leaps and bounds.

In this project I am interested in imagining how these devices look at our earth, how are the Argentine spaces where they are created and repaired and how we can think of new narratives around them outside of the spatial stereotype of other parts of the world. Now, in a DIY way, I am now working on an antenna to investigate how to get images from these satellites.

With fiction, irony and creativity, I am interested in asking questions to the documentary photography and their practices. This project is part of a larger project that has to do with the sovereignty of our territory and the injustices we experience on the world of today, which with the fantasy of 'progress' and denying neocolonial practices thinks it's always better than the world of yesterday.