This machinima video, filmed inside the Surviving Mars video game (Haemimont Games, 2018), draws inspiration from early 1950s science fiction, particularly the Mars colony stories of Arthur C. Clarke (1951). It extends these speculative imaginings into a contemporary critique, questioning whether the dream of Mars is destined to collapse into endless labour, serving the extractivist ambitions of the billionaires who founded the colony.
 

The piece reflects on the embodied experiences of controlled environments and self-contained, capsule-like ecosystems through its protagonist, an avatar navigating life on Mars. Forced to flee her homeworld, she arrived on the Red Planet seeking safety and opportunity, only to find herself visa-tied to her precarious job at Amazon’s Martian colony. Her past qualifications, which were once those of a doctor, a lawyer, or a skilled professional, are unrecognised. Instead of practising her profession, she now works in a packaging plant, boxing Martian rock regolith to be sold as souvenirs on Earth.
 

Her longing for the untamed nature and freedom of her homeworld clashes with the sterile, barren colony she chose to live in. The rigid, artificial environment offers no escape, mirroring the predicament of countless  displaced people, forced to leave everything behind, only to be trapped in an exploitative system that renders them invisible. Stripped of their former identities, they are confined to low-wage, high-surveillance labour, unable to return home and unable to move forward. On Mars, as on Earth, the promise of a new world is revealed to be just another factory floor.

Full HD video 
Machinima 

shown at :
Virtual Mixing - AP project, Valletta, MT
Notte Bianca Paris (2021) w/ The Wrong TV
at Réseaux-mondes - Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR)