‘Cosmographies’ film screening by visiting guest Prof. Juan Salazar, Western Sydney University

On behalf of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab I would like to extend an invitation to a screening of the speculative film ‘Cosmographies’ by Professor Juan Franscisco Salazar, Western Sydney University.

‘Cosmographies’ is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert and to Aotearoa.. 

Juan Francisco Salazar was born in Santiago, Chile, and migrated to Sydney in 1998. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, author and documentary filmmaker whose academic and creative work explore the coupled dynamics of social-ecological change and is underpinned by a collaborative ethos across the arts, science and activism. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2020-2024) with a project on critical social studies of outer space that continues his decade long cultural research on Antarctica. During this work in Antarctica (2010-2020), he led the Antarctic Cities project, with a team of 15 researchers in five countries and co-founded the international Antarctic Youth Coalition in 2020.