Space Is a Magic Place (But Earth Is Better)
Marsica Fossati
February 3, 2025 – June 28,2025
In a recent article for ARTnews about the rapid opening and closing of outposts of American art galleries in Mexico City, Issa Benítez (vice president of GAMA, the association of the City’s art galleries) describes them as UFOs: making their quick departures, she suggests, actually less strange than their initial arrivals. It is as if they came and went without ever making contact. Because their alienness seemed weirdly incurious and inexplicably unmotivated by real cultural exchange. Are there good alien invasions and bad alien invasions? Of course. In the movie, ET came to Earth to shop for plants, ended up becoming our friend and teaching us about empathy, not to subjugate humanity or resource-strip our planet.
Several years ago Marsica Fossati (born Italy, 1987) visited Fundación Casa Wabi on the beach in Oaxaca. The whole complex is both perfectly contextual and entirely alien: Tadao Ando’s sensibility and design, executed in a hybrid Japanese-Oaxacan building vernacular by local craftspeople. Walking through the collection of pavilions by a panoply of well-known architects in the garden—constituting an otherworldly oasis of design-consciousness—Marsica imagined what she might do there. She began with one of the seminal images of space age modernism: the silver bullet of an Airstream trailer passing incongruously through a California desert (and then, in the company’s advertising, through every other environment on earth). The Airstream was a postwar symbol of the revival of an old idea, nomadism: that one could live a different, freer life while travelling the world. It was one of many counterculture alternatives to convention incited by a new generation of sacred texts like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), in which, not incidentally, heading for Mexico City represents “entering a new and unknown phase of things.”
From that simple beginning Marsica created a science fiction scenario for herself in which much of what is good on Earth (our curiosity, our spirituality, our cosmic-mindedness) is the legacy of galaxy-hopping aliens who came here in gleaming spaceships at some point in the distant past. Not as conquerors, but as teachers: to seed those qualities in our ancestors. Prometheuses from the stars. Are there good alien invasions and bad alien invasions? Of course.
Digging into the cultural heritage of Mexico, as a way to engage with the technology these aliens gifted to us, Marsica went on to design a stainless steel, Airstream-inspired variation on the traditional Mesoamerican sweatlodge (temazcal). Devised to double as a kind of psychic planetarium, it is intended to enable a different kind of journeying. Unfortunately, humanity still hasn’t fully mastered the technology, and so Marsica hasn’t yet been able to build it as she envisions. But in a plot twist, the aliens have returned and landed in a pair of spaceships: one, sleek and refined, has touched down on a nearby volcano (on the ground floor patio); the other, masquerading as a meteorite, has crashed on the third floor terrace. Why they’re here is unclear. Perhaps it is to assess the state of our spiritual development. Maybe they can help.
Dakin Hart
Curator
Several years ago Marsica Fossati (born Italy, 1987) visited Fundación Casa Wabi on the beach in Oaxaca. The whole complex is both perfectly contextual and entirely alien: Tadao Ando’s sensibility and design, executed in a hybrid Japanese-Oaxacan building vernacular by local craftspeople. Walking through the collection of pavilions by a panoply of well-known architects in the garden—constituting an otherworldly oasis of design-consciousness—Marsica imagined what she might do there. She began with one of the seminal images of space age modernism: the silver bullet of an Airstream trailer passing incongruously through a California desert (and then, in the company’s advertising, through every other environment on earth). The Airstream was a postwar symbol of the revival of an old idea, nomadism: that one could live a different, freer life while travelling the world. It was one of many counterculture alternatives to convention incited by a new generation of sacred texts like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), in which, not incidentally, heading for Mexico City represents “entering a new and unknown phase of things.”
From that simple beginning Marsica created a science fiction scenario for herself in which much of what is good on Earth (our curiosity, our spirituality, our cosmic-mindedness) is the legacy of galaxy-hopping aliens who came here in gleaming spaceships at some point in the distant past. Not as conquerors, but as teachers: to seed those qualities in our ancestors. Prometheuses from the stars. Are there good alien invasions and bad alien invasions? Of course.
Digging into the cultural heritage of Mexico, as a way to engage with the technology these aliens gifted to us, Marsica went on to design a stainless steel, Airstream-inspired variation on the traditional Mesoamerican sweatlodge (temazcal). Devised to double as a kind of psychic planetarium, it is intended to enable a different kind of journeying. Unfortunately, humanity still hasn’t fully mastered the technology, and so Marsica hasn’t yet been able to build it as she envisions. But in a plot twist, the aliens have returned and landed in a pair of spaceships: one, sleek and refined, has touched down on a nearby volcano (on the ground floor patio); the other, masquerading as a meteorite, has crashed on the third floor terrace. Why they’re here is unclear. Perhaps it is to assess the state of our spiritual development. Maybe they can help.
Dakin Hart
Curator