AL-MARS
A historical timeline plotting the race to colonize Mars against the race to colonize the Arab world
Interactive robotic sculptures and etchings on oxidized brass, 2019
To journey back through a timeline drawing parallels between the colonization of Mars and the techno-colonization of the Arab world, Shono assembles a set of speculative landers, each machine marking the date of a Mars landing and its equivalent colonial event in the Arab world.
For Shono, the Arab world becomes a martian surface experiencing foreign techno-colonial landings that have sought to establish footholds of influence and power across the Arab region. Each landing acts as a reminder of the historical dependency of the Arab world on Western technology and the influence the latter can exert.
Unable to forge a vessel to journey to Mars, the artist instead revisits historical events that have shaped the surface of the Arab world using his imagined story landers to journey him there.
I was younger when the landers first arrived. They ate the earth and drank the rivers dry.
I did not see them when they touched the ground. But I heard them when they tore through the sky.
My father stood in the field where one did land. He told us stories about that lander late in the night:
“It had a tail of fire as it fell to the earth. It planted itself in the soil and unfolded, with its reflective petals chasing the sun.”
My father watched the lander as it opened its eyes, spun its neck and fed from the ground.
So he fetched water for the traveler with a pouch my mother had made.
Many times I heard him say,
“Even a traveling river we offer it water to drink.”
He placed the pouch at the foot of the lander but its stance did not change.
So he poured the water into its mouth until the lander shivered and its skin began to stain.
“Rust coloured its mouth and began to spread across its body and limbs. It then became stiff and hulked over before my eyes. I saw it turn to iron dust.”
My father would proclaim.
The rust continued to spread. It spread to the trees and across the field. It consumed our home and the homes on the lands that neighboured our own.
Even my father, once tall like steel, was consumed with grief until he was rust.
Today I return to a land i do not know. Its soil is red with the rust of the machines that have continued to come, and the rust that has spilled from our veins.
I stood where my father once did, with a pouch of water in my fist.
I watched the skies and waited for the machines to descend, ready to welcome the thirsty landers again.
Oxidised brass sheets, metallic components and robotic motors.
LANDER 1971
Mission: Mars 2, The Soviet Union.
Event; The Construction of the Aswan High Damn in Egypt.
LANDER 1973
Mission: Mars 3, The Soviet Union
Event: The 1973 ‘October war’LANDER 1976
Mission: Viking 1 & Viking 2, The United States
Event: The Syrian occupation of Lebanon
LANDER 2003
Mission: Beagle 2, The United Kingdom
Event: 2003 invasion of Iraq
LANDER 2012
Mission: Curiosity (Mars Scince Laboratory), The United States
Event: Second Egyptian “Arab spring” protests