Embarking on a journey to imagine possible worlds means approaching the territory in the form of an essay, blurring and summoning the borders between the earthly and the cosmic, the natural and the manufactured. It means leaving Earth for a moment, glimpsing the endless abyss of the ends of the world that lurk around us, reimagining narratives, and returning to reconfigure something — anything.

Near the salt flats of the Sonoran Desert, in El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar — where the land transforms into crystalline horizons and the sand reminds us that this was once sea — Interplanetary Simulacra took place: a research residency aimed at opening rifts between artistic and scientific practices by invoking intersections with disciplines such as planetary geology, astronomy, and astronautics, as well as the ancestral knowledge of the local Tohono O’odham people.

This exhibition is the result of an artistic residency in which five Latin American artists, immersed for a month in the vibrant geography and exoplanetary landscapes of the Sonoran Desert — shaped by star dunes, salt flats, and volcanic craters — together with other invited artists, explore fundamental themes such as imagining life beyond Earth, speculating about possible futures, questioning the narratives of interplanetary colonization, and reflecting, through each piece, on our relationship with the environment and its infinite possibilities.

Some pieces refer to visions of ecosystems created to contain extraterrestrial life, while others unearth remnants of the human in landscapes that could come from Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or any other planet. These provocations invite us to ask: what does it mean to carry this humanity to other worlds? How can we avoid repeating the mistakes of our extractivist dynamics here on Earth? Imagining the cosmos is also imagining how to remain on this planet without exhausting it.

The desert now functions as a mirror, showing the distant past of our planet while simultaneously advancing scenarios of imaginary futures. The salt that holds the memories of water becomes a symbolic element linking the human with the cosmic, the limited with the infinite, the singular with the collective.

Interplanetary Simulations invites us to explore territories that seem as distant as they are familiar, reevaluating the relationships between the micro and the macro to conceive forms of life that emerge when this humanity stops opposing itself to the universe and its complexity