The Surly Bonds of Earth

The cosmos was never simply out there; it also happened down here.

The celestial has always shaped human life on earth: its rituals, calendars, journeys, spiritual practices, bodily cycles, and forms of social organization — across chronologies and knowledge traditions.

The Surly Bonds of Earth is the second chapter of In Relation, an exhibition bringing works from the Spore Collection into changing constellations. The exhibited works move between planetary images, photographs of lunar expeditions, and artistic explorations on territories marked by colonial violence.

At the centre of the exhibition lies an act of intentional burning. Regina José Galindo’s work La Intención evokes histories of witch-hunting, accusation and sacrifice: a scapegoat selected to embody collective fears and violence. The sacrifice does not occur in an imagined future.

Many are already enduring the fires, losses, and displacements that sustain the horizons of the few – whether in the territories ravaged by colonialism, such as Brazil evoked in Jaime Lauriano’s work, or in less visible forms of dispossession that shape lives across the world.

These works speak of the wonder of looking towards distant worlds and the histories of power embedded in that gaze. Space exploration emerged through geopolitical competition and military technologies. Today, the alliance of technology, private capital, and state power increasingly presents the celestial as a new frontier to colonize, militarize, and exploit: A movement outwards that takes place as ecosystems on Earth degrade, species are driven towards extinction, and environmental collapse accelerates.

The exhibition takes apart the fantasy that another world might remain to be claimed once this one has been exhausted, and asks: What world are you attending to

“The Surly Bonds of Earth” is a title adapted from the poem “High Flight” by war poet, John Gillespie Magee Jr. The phrase became part of President Ronald Regan’s address after the NASA Challenger disaster in January 1986, and as such is bound up in military history, space exploration, as well as capturing a detail about human relating.