Failing Forward

Failing Forward connects images of little and big mysteries, over the years encountered by Marjolein Blom, with photos from the NASA-Archive depicting scientists working on spacecraft models.

Fifty years ago, in an era popularly known as the Space Age, optimism concerning scientific progress seemed endless. The desire to put the first humans on the Moon spurred advances in technology. However, while techniques from the space industry found a way into our daily lives, science and the everyday world grew increasingly apart. Scientific interpretations are complicated for non-experts to grasp, resulting in an exchange based on trust.

This relationship has always been fragile but, in recent years, has become unstable, with scientific facts often regarded as 'opinions'. But the truth is that science actually is a temporary and uncertain activity, with ambiguity and unpredictability as fundamental elements of its process. Could we see science as a metaphor for life itself? Just as surprising and unsure? A process of fall and rise?

In Failing Forward, Marjolein Blom touches on the core of what connects art, science, and life: that all are uncertain exercises with uncertain results. Her own photographic work of minor and major mysteries from the everyday world is interwoven with image-crops from the NASA archive.

This work revolves around truth-finding, wonder and human control. While shifting between the enigmatic and the specific, between the clear and the ambiguous, it navigates the two parallel worlds of our scientific and daily reality. And makes tangible that the thought that we humans will ever be in control in this world, in the end, is a delusion.

*Failing Forward will be published with The Eriskay Connection in July 2022