Fiorentino, R. (2024). Habitat for the Human Animal [Film, Scenography, Live Performance]. HI-SEAS Mars Research Base, Hawaii. The Showroom, Los Angeles, California.

The twenty-first century marks a renewed push to make human life interplanetary. As we ascend towards this brave new world, what lesson should we carry forth from former great migrations? What pasts will prepare us for the futures that await in the new frontier?

A provocation on where and who we are as a prospectively interplanetary species, Habitat for the Human Animal is a visual treatise of performative science fiction which seeks to disrupt conventional narratives of space colonization. Looking past entrenched settler-colonial ideologies of the past century, it provides an alternative vision of space; a mirror reflecting societal interiors.

Fiorentino's analogue astronaut self-portraiture contrasts existing visual conventions of distant landscapes, and invites the audience on a visceral journey into the human condition. Set in a simulated Mars habitat, it casts a future space settler in an existentialist drama that investigates the needs of humans in high stress environments. Guided through the psychological toil of extreme isolation, the artwork interrogates history and the often masculine glamor once associated with American exceptionalism.

Acting both as a bellwether and a counter to contemporary western culture's thirst to conquer the work takes the audience on a psychonautic trip into the mind of this space traveler, excavating the past and future of space anthropology, while mining the images which in the collective consciousness have become staples of techno-industrial progress.