Mirror Mars - Limited Edition 1 of 7 Photograph

Mirror Mars is one of the works in my series Here There Are Lions. The series involves a verifictional approach of art making. One that mixes imagination with real astronomical data and more pictorial ways of representing views of place, space migration and expatriation. The series further explores the framing of expatriation into outer space, while linking with concepts of transience and identity. Is there an end to being in this ‘place’ of no home? Can the last version of human expatriation lead to space migration? Here There Are Lions maps out home and space migration as a credible futuristic possibility and addresses the aforementioned questions through practice and theory on space migration and vernacular futurology in art, science and society. The title of my project derives from the Latin HIC SVNT LEONES “here there are lions” and the practice of ancient Roman and medieval cartographers. The phrase was used to connote unknown dangerous or unexplored lands beyond the current cartography. Space is still an unexplored, dangerous, and unmapped territory; therefore, the title and its metaphor are intrinsic to my series. I have followed different representational motifs from ancient cartographers to illustrate a treacherous journey through uncharted space during an extra-terrestrial expatriation. My motifs are more elemental. I represent space frontiers, views of the void in space, other celestial bodies, real and fake but plausible astronomical events through shapes, colours, and light, as one would view them if travelling close by.