Publication | Thesis Presented at Dutch Design Week, 2024

Earth-from-space images from the late 20th century — such as Earthrise, Blue Marble, and Pale Blue Dot — were heralded as catalysts for a renewed awareness and relationship with the planet. Instead, these images have reinforced the modern gaze of totality and control from a distance. The thesis explores how to disentangle from this mindset of modernity, presenting the invented concept of a Monstrous Earth; a propositional valence for how we may invent a different type of mediation of the Planet from the position of an Earthbound figure. Residing on a Monstrous Earth implies embarking on a post-Anthropocentric self-understanding, without neglecting our anthropomorphic condition.

Embracing the Monstrous Earth as a metaphorical lens through which to encounter the planet opens the possibility of relinquishing the desire for control. It invites a fall into the terror of its unfathomable complexity, with tensions that cannot be resolved. In resisting tyrannical notions of wholeness and suffocating illusions of mastery, the Monstrous Earth is an attempt to fluctuate through various registers of scale: simultaneously the intimate and subjective, and the monstrously inhuman. It is an invitation to stitch together a partial script of fragmented and shifting voices and to, ultimately, relate to the Earth differently.