The above figure by Skylar Grayson is sourced from Prof. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s “Fund astronomy, not genocide” newsletter, also linked in “To Read” below, showing missions that will be canceled or endangered if the Trump budget proposal succeeds. Read more from Skylar on BSky.

In this issue:

• First light images from the Rubin Observatory

• An interview with interdisciplinary researcher Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar

• To read: Fund astronomy, not genocide

• To watch: Livestream Reclaiming the Future

Greetings, Earthlings!
We hope you’re enjoying the gorgeous first-light images from the Rubin Observatory, which dropped on Monday. These images are such high resolution, it would take 400 ultra HD TVs to display them in their full glory! Fortunately, the Rubin team has made a tool where you can zoom in and explore the images to your heart’s content, as well as videos of prerecorded tours if you want to let someone else drive.

To Read: Over at The Edge of Space-Time, Prof. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein writes about defending astronomy while so many other things, peoples, and basic rights are in urgent need of defense.

To Watch: Speaking of Prof. Prescod-Weinstein, you can catch her and JustSpace co-Founder Dr. Lucian Walkowicz’s livestreamed session at Haymarket Publishing’s upcoming Socialism Conference, coming up on July 4th at 5pm CT, titled Reclaiming the Future: Outer Space as a Site of Organizing and Imagination.

And now, on to our main feature!

Q&A with Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar

For this edition of our newsletter, we spoke with Professor Juan Franciscio Salazar , a Chilean-born filmmaker, anthropologist and interdisciplinary researcher who directs the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Professor Salazar currently serves on the JustSpace Board. This interview has been lightly edited for readability.

Please tell me about your current position and the work that you do.

I have been at Western Sydney University for 25 years now. I'm currently the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society; it’s a research Institute, and I'm a full professor there in Communication, Media and Environment.

And can you tell me about what your day to day looks like? What kind of work are you thinking about right now?

Well, my day to day changed a little bit this year, because I have a more admin role, managing about 120 people. It's a year of a bit of a crisis in the university. So, it's been a hard year of managing change, where the humanities and social sciences seem to be again under attack from so many fronts– for funding, for relevance.

Before this year, I was on a four year research-only fellowship, which was about critical imaginaries of space futures. [During that time] I made a film, I co-edited a book with Alice Gorman, I did a report for the Australian Space Agency, and [put on] a series of events for the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Sounds like it's just as busy as always, although maybe a little more admin is… not quite as fun.

It was a dramatic change from a wonderful experience to a very challenging one. It's not that I'm not enjoying it, it's just that it's very challenging when people are losing their jobs.

When I talk about your work to people, I use “media anthropology”, or describe your work using broad areas like “Indigenous film practices”-- would you describe the work that you do for our readers?

I think [media anthropology] could be accurate. I think I like to see myself more as an interdisciplinary researcher these days, working around questions of social environmental justice, broadly speaking, using scholarly approaches as well as non-traditional practice, based on research creation– and mixing the two of them.

My undergraduate was in anthropology, and my PhD was in media studies, so the combination of those two is what media anthropology is. It's basically a focus on media practices, and how cultures and cultural groups use the media (or not); questions about representation in the media, cultural representations in the media. As applied to outer space, it would be about representations, narratives, imaginaries of space across a range of media.

[Media can mean] audiovisual media, but also it could be literature, it could be science fiction, it could be news.

My interest is [mostly in] experimental film– documentary film– and in creating different stories about outer space [than] the more hegemonic stories that are presented (from governments, sometimes from science, sometimes from popular culture) and see what other alternatives or radical narratives one could develop or understand.

By radical, I don't mean necessarily politically radical, but radical in terms of roots, of going to roots of other knowledges– Indigenous knowledges, or knowledges that non-Western people may have, artists from different backgrounds.

So that's a little bit of what I do.

Within the humanities and social sciences in the last decade, there’s been a new interdisciplinary field called social studies of outer space, which comes out of science and technology studies (an interest that emerged [around] the late 70s, early 80s, study [of] the cultural and political implications of scientific practices). [Within social studies of outer space] there's a [newer] emerging interdisciplinary field that is being called the space humanities.

So there's Antarctic humanities, environmental humanities, blue humanities, and now there seems to be an emerging space humanities bringing people from geography, history, literature, art.

I'm curious about the path that led you to what you do now: how did you become interested in anthropology and media, how has your work intersected with space, and what led that to happen?

I think that interest [happened] quite early. I am from Chile. I moved to Sydney, Australia in 1998 to pursue a PhD in communication and media studies. And I studied anthropology at the University of Chile in the early 90s. [At the University of Chile] I developed an interest in visual anthropology and media anthropology and early documentary films– ethnographic films and that sort of stuff.

Those were the times of the transition from military dictatorship to democracy: the Pinochet dictatorship ended in 1990, and I started university in 1990. It was a very politically charged environment– scary, but beautiful– about opening up and defeating a very ruthless dictatorship.

I was [18, 19 years old during this] beautiful period, and at that time I was also reading a lot of science fiction. I started reading science fiction quite early on, you know, some of the classics like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. But then when I started university, I started to read speculative fiction and feminist speculative fiction, and I found a very different way to understand science fiction as a way of thinking. [These works were] inspired by feminist thought and feminist practices in the early 90s, and a very different way of telling stories about time, space, space, time that I couldn't really find in the more traditional male authors. I fell in love with the work of Ursula Le Guin, who was the daughter of anthropologists, and her work was very ethnographic and very anthropological science fiction.

So [I had] an early interest in that mix, [but] then that got parked for maybe 20 years, where I started to work on something else– about communication rights, Indigenous communication rights, and Indigenous social movement. [Those topics are] what I did my PhD on when I worked in Chile, Mexico, and Colombia.

Then, in 2015, I started to work in Antarctica. I had a funded project to do ethnographic work in Antarctic scientific stations in the Antarctic Peninsula, and I collaborated with many scientists, glaciologists, marine microbiologists, oceanographers. It was a very fruitful exchange of ways of understanding Antarctica as a quasi extraterrestrial space, as a kind of stepping stone to outer space, as a place otherworldly where you need some kind of life support systems, you know, not oxygen, but definitely more sophisticated infrastructure and logistics to allow you to live there– [even in a ] transitory [sense], not even permanently.

I developed a film and an ethnographic project [in Antarctica] that [combined] interviews with a range of scientists [about] everything that was happening around the moons of the Jovian system, and the possibility of microorganisms existing in liquid oceans beneath the ice. The connection to Antarctica [is] that as we know, under the ice there are rivers and lakes that are thousands of years old, maybe older, and that potentially can have microbial life that we know little or nothing about.

It was a life-changing experience of observing, understanding how humans tried to make themselves at home in this extreme environment and the implications of it– the ethical questions (whether we should be there or not), which are similar to outer space (should we go to outer space or not). If we go, we pollute, we contaminate.

But the place where I was staying, King George Island– some scientists call it a “zone of sacrifice” that is needed to be able to explore the interior of the Antarctic– with less [of a] footprint, but some footprint needs to be had.

[On King George Island] there's a lot of pollution: microplastics, ocean currents bring debris from coasts from far away, so it was a very complex scenario. I wasn't interested in the sort of heroic era of colonial colonization of the Antarctic, but in the future of the Antarctic: where are we going, and how Antarctica allows us to think differently about the planet. And that was a stepping stone to thinking about outer space.

The film I did in Antarctica [was] called Nightfall on Gaia, [starring] a fictional character called Xue Noon. She's a Maori astrobiologist in Antarctica in the year 2038, and she's conducting research on extremophiles as preparation for the first crewed mission to the moon Europa. The story jumps in and out of documentary and science fiction.

[Nightfall on Gaia] was the prequel to the film that I just finished, [a film] called Cosmographies with the same fictional character. This time, Xue Noon is on Mars where they have found evidence or biosignatures of rotifers, similar to rotifers found on Earth. She is sent there to retrieve these samples of microorganisms, and then all [kinds of] things happen.

[The film is] a metaphor for the huge impact of mining extractivism has had in the Atacama Desert over 200 years, and the potential of that we are living in a very important age where we're about to step out of Earth– not just to send a few men to the moon and back, but potentially to develop more permanent human settlements. How will we prepare to do that if we're going to go out to do what we've done to the Atacama Desert over 200 years? Is that the way we should be going to space, and what can [we learn from] the story of the Atacama Desert not only the last 200 years, but the last 13,000 years of Indigenous people living there, or the last 2 billion years of microbial mats that exist in the brines of the Atacama Desert that are essential for biodiversity? What are the lessons that all these forms of life are telling us about how we should be thinking about outer space?

You mention that Nightfall on Gaia is a prequel to Cosmographies, the film you just finished. Given that it’s been ten years since the prequel, what prompted you to make Cosmographies at this moment in time?

Nightfall on Gaia was a collaboration with Victoria Hunt, an Australian Maori performance artist and photographer. In 2019 she was in a very deep journey of learning her Whakapapa, her Maori genealogy and her heritage. She brought a little bit of that journey into the film, and we built the character based on her own personal life and journey of learning or discovery. [However], we felt that the film had too much documentary, and we never went deep enough into the story of this fictional character.

Well, seven years later, I was planning to do a new film. I didn't know it would be about outer space, [but my interest was sparked by the] wave of New Space coming into outer space. Private industry, venture capital, the rise of billionaires with the infrastructure and funding to start working with national space agencies and transforming the way that outer space is understood and accessed. [Along with that], this new race to develop settlement on the moon, to have in situ resources, exploitation of resources or resource utilization, or starting the exploration deeper in the solar system. [There were also] scientific discoveries, you know, exoplanets.

So, there was a range of things that came together, and I was also really inspired by the work of people like you, Lucian, another astronomers that took a political stance about your scientific practice, that your scientific work that you do is not only important and significant for the value to science, but what is the value to society? How do we need to change the language that we use?

You know, why do we need to say the “hunt” for life in the universe? Who made us the hunters with the power to go on hunt for anything, or “colonization”, or “settlement”.

[At this time] there was also a new series by AppleTV, For All Mankind, where the settlement on the moon is called Jamestown– the same name of what the British called the first settlement in North America in the early 1700s– so the reproduction of that colonial narrative into space.

There were many things happening, so I thought this was a good moment for me to try and say something, and say something from the Global South: from Chile, from Aoteroa (New Zealand). From a project that could bring Western science and Indigenous science together, working with land defenders in the Atacama Desert.

It also had to do with the interest in lithium in the Atacama Desert. Lithium has been exploited since the 80s, but it's only in the last 10 years that there's been a race because of the green transition, [the desire of the] Global North to create batteries for electric vehicles and other stuff.

[Alongside these] different paths coming together, I was in central Australia, in the desert, to find a film. I traveled for three weeks by myself, and sometimes with some colleagues. I wanted the landscape to speak to me, and the stories to come up, but no stories came out of that trip. It was a beautiful landscape, beautiful people, but [it] was not happening.

One day, I was sick with a lot of fever, and I had a dream with Victoria [Hunt] telling me that I had to call her, and we needed to go back to the character of Xue Noon. I called her [and asked], “Are you interested in doing a sequel?” and she said “Perfect”.

Because I had worked in the Atacama Desert for 30 years, since the early 90s when I was doing anthropology and archaeology, everything came together. I went there, met new colleagues, and we developed a close relationship with the Likan Antay community who are now co-producers of the film. [The Likan Antay are] the Indigenous community where the ALMA Observatory is [located], and part of their stories of defending land and land and water is [in the film].

ALMA rents the area from the Chilean government, but it's within an Indigenous ancestral territory. The communities are fighting for that territory but do not have free access to the land that ALMA is on. Some of the herders bring their llamas through, but [they don’t have access to land] that they have used for 13,000 years because now it's private property. [The Likan Antay are] interested in the work that ALMA does studying the cold parts of the universe, and a lot of the amazing science that is done there, but they feel that that knowledge does not stay in the communities. [Instead] it's published in journals elsewhere, and that level of knowledge does not stay in the territory.

There's a lot of conflict. I don't like those binaries of good people and bad people– everyone is good and bad. But I wanted to present the complexity of the situation and the message that outer space is never outer. Earth is the cosmos, we are as “outer” as Mars. [I wanted to convey] this cosmic connection, that we cannot continue to see ourselves separate from outer space, [in the same way] as the environment not being separate from us. I wanted to try and have a message that we are in cosmic complexity, and the politics of Earth are related to the politics of space.

You know, I think you and I share this outlook that space and Earth are one in the same. That everything that is supposedly for space or happening in space is playing out in real time with people on this planet, which is obviously not separate from space. So, I'm curious: what do you feel are the most urgent issues right now that intersect with space?

I think there's many. One is how can we, on the one hand, work with scientists to defend science from the onslaught of extreme right wing politics, anti-science that you're having in your country and in many other countries around the world. These kinds of anti-science stands are really dangerous.

I think that on the one hand, astronomy and planetary sciences are important to understand– Where we come from in the deepest sense. Cosmic dust. From the beginning of the Big Bang, or whatever is going to be the theory that replaces the Big Bang in some decades to come. I think that kind of knowledge is some of the most beautiful knowledge that humans can generate. That needs to be defended, protected, supported, and brought into dialogue with other ancestral knowledge that also comes from observation of the stars, that do not use Western scientific methods but use other methods of deep observation, and is linked to a spiritual understanding of the universe that are (in my opinion) as valid as the other forms of knowledge making. If those two can come together, well, then we can become a more mature species that operates in this world with a different ethics, treading more carefully and more lightly on our planet.

The other side of that coin is the way that science operates within an industrial military complex, not outside of it. [The US] had a military parade, NASA's funding is being cut, the US created a Space Force some years ago. So, the way that science operates is often problematic and reproduces a way of conducting science that is 200 or 300 years old and created a lot of violence. That violence today could be different, but it's ongoing violence: You may not have a genocide of people, but there is epistemicide of other knowledges, and we're seeing that in Gaza, etc. So the other complexity is how science could be, [how it] could operate in different ways. [Currently science operates] as if the territories [of outer space] are empty, devoid of other peoples, devoid of other knowledges, and for the benefit of humankind– and I think that “benefit of humankind” is very dangerous. That's what's driving the green transition, the need to have electric cars, [the need] get to net zero, and [the belief] we can continue to consume the same level of massive consumption. The problem is we need to consume less, we cannot expect to just drive electric vehicles, which implies more extraction of critical minerals from the Congo, from Indonesia, or from Chile.

The third complexity is the extreme power of utopian technocapitalism. Millionaires, male misogynists with a very peculiar way of view: that It's too late to solve the issues [on this planet] so it is cheaper– or it is a destiny– to become an interplanetary species. That is also part of the problem we see in Gaza at the moment, where some people say it's their destiny to go back to that land and they are chosen by God. Those kinds of narratives are really dangerous.

I think these three things that are important for me, and that they come together around an economic model, which is late capitalism. That's what ties the three together. I don't know what the alternative is– I don't think any of the other models that have been tried are any better, but I'm sure that there must be an alternative to capitalism, which is a system that eats itself. We're very close to witnessing how the whole system eating itself doesn't have more stuff to eat, [with people justifying that] that's why outer space is so important: because it's full of mineral resources.

I'm really struck by the fact that you were entering your fields and your work at a time when Chile was going through this incredible transition out of the Pinochet dictatorship. I wonder if you have any comments that you might like to share about how having an early experience of a liberatory victory might have affected your outcome and your work after that.

That's a tricky question. I was born in Chile, but I grew up outside of Chile [in Argentina and Colombia] and came back when I was 15, [in 1986]. It was the time of the beginning of massive pro-democracy protests, but it was [also] a time of a lot of violence. Some of the most infamous crimes were committed in the last years of the dictatorship.The first years were massive torture, exile and people disappearing, and the last years were targeted murders, including the leaders of the high school student movement. I had a lot of friends who were high school students that were involved and who didn't make it to the end.

I think in my life, it's probably been the only time of success. For [activists and organizers], there's more failures than victories, I think. So, it marked me forever, that period. It made me who I am and [informed] what I wanted to do in my life. It was the most important political event that marked me for the rest of my life.

If you fast forward 30 years, to the Chilean Estado Social* outburst… it could have been another victory. It was the most beautiful for some months. I [was in] Santiago in the middle of the outburst, and I don't remember seeing Chile as beautiful as those months. People were on the streets, [offering] classes on power in the parks, discussing films, discussing politics, cooking for each other, dancing… discussing how to change the country, how to change the constitution.

The process to write a new constitution was really beautiful, powerful, deep, liberatory, transformative. The constitutional convention was led by a woman, Elisa Loncón, who led with an idea of how Chile could be different. It was another big moment in my life, and the lives of millions of Chileans.

However, there was a vacuum of power where that movement was hijacked by violent, destructive forces that were there not for a political change, but just to destroy. I think that led a lot of Chileans to [become] scared of what was happening, [to fear] that the country was going into chaos. There was a vacuum [of power] in which a lot of organized crime entered the country– from Venezuela, from Peru, from Colombia, from Mexico. Chile had crime like every other country, but not organized crime at the level that we have now. It started to morph into a very different type of movement, and that political movement got hijacked and pushed in a different direction.Then, the referendum was a huge failure: 62-38 against a new constitution. The movement [was] derided as a failure, a violent failure that should never have happened.

However, those seeds that were planted are still there, you know, they're little plants, they may grow into trees. That spirit will never die in a sense. It will always be there, because it was a little glimpse of how a country could have changed– dramatically, overnight.

It coincided with the rise of the extreme right everywhere in the world as well, so it was [...] not the right time, possibly, for that seed to grow. But the seed is still there in the soil. You cannot kill the seed. I made [my film, Cosmographies] in that context of “the future can be different”. The future can always be different.

How can people see Cosmographies?

The film is doing the round of film festivals. The competition to get films shown is fierce these days, and it's difficult because it's an experimental film that does not really meet the requirements of the festivals. It's a difficult film to program, but I think it's an interesting film to watch and discuss. After it does the round of festivals, probably by October, I'll just put [up to watch for] free online. My interest is not in getting money out of this, it’s in sharing the work. I'm interested in what a range of people can say about the film, [I want to hear] what scientists say about it, what Indigenous activists say about it, what other artists say. So please: get in touch!

You can learn more about Prof. Juan Salazar’s work here.

Learn about Cosmographies and request a screening here.