This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe (STARS)
film installation, 26 min., 2025 
perforated screen, 210 x 280 cm

“This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe (STARS)” leads the viewers from an observatory in the Peruvian Andes to an archive in Cambridge, from the surface of the Earth to the depths of the starry sky, from problematic histories of the past to their echoes in the present. A digitalized archive of photographic glass plates from the Institute of Astronomy at Harvard serves as the starting point for a polyphonic narrative that situates the production of astronomic knowledge in the contemporary context of data extractivism. Through the re-enactment of a historic working process in which female astronomers (called ‘computers’) had numerically registered and categorised photographic data, the film develops a performative setting: Counting and narrating, swiping and scrolling, zooming in and out of astronomic images, the protagonists collectively investigate how ‘objective facts’ and ‘scientific truths’ are deeply embedded in imperialistic processes of extraction (of labour and resources) and erasure (of other kinds of knowledges).


In an exhibition context, “This Aggregate of Images That Is the Universe (STARS)” is presented as a film projection on a perforated screen which is based on the star constellation Small Magellanic Cloud.