World Space Week 2025

Marking World Space Week 2024

As part of UCL’s Gaia Public Programme, UCL East marks World Space Week 2024 by announcing Sarah Fortais – UCL Slade alumni – as commissioned artist for an exhibition and installation which will be presented at UCL East for World Space Week 2025.

World Space Week is an international celebration of science and technology, held annually from 4-10 October. Sarah Fortais has been selected by a panel through an open call process which invited artists to submit a proposal based on the theme of space.

Sarah Fortais 

Sarah Fortais is a Canadian artist who received a Fine Art PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018), where she built spacesuits for animals, borrowed NASA moon rocks, and created strategies to define what it means to call a person or thing ‘cool’.

“I intially answered the expression of interest because I am an artist that has been interested in space junk and the Overview Effect for over 9 years and getting the chance to create work in the new UCL Marshgate site sounded like an exciting opportunity to me. I have actually been creating space-themed artworks in the Olympic Park site for over 13 years (since I moved to the UK) primarily using discarded materials, and so I am looking forward to using our own terrestrial debris to help tell the story about cosmic debris left by satellites and activity in space. A particularly exciting aspect of my proposal for Space Week 2025 are a series of free hand casting workshops that I will be hosting in the borough of Newham. By using hands to visualise space debris I think we can start to humanise this ecological problem, and begin to look at it as something manageable through time by working together through multiple generations. At the end of the World Space Week 2025 exhibition, participants will be able to take home their hand castings and hopefully we'll all come away feeling as though we celebrated the potential for future off-world living.

“Part of my interest in the UCL Marshgate site also has to do with the site's historical connection to sheep grazing, the brand new Institute of Making facilities at UCL East, and the permanant installation of Luke Jerram's Gaia sculpture. I'd like to combine all three interests with a week-long performance that includes grazing a 'cosmic flock' of life-sized sheep in the Olympic Park and producing an accompanying exhibition that shares knowledge about the surprising, sad, and thought provoking history of animals in space. I am also looking forward to collaborating with the UCL community, especially the Centre for Outer Space Studies and the Lunga 6 Mission Crew. Lunga 6 was the UK's first Analogue Space Research Mission (taking place in May 2022) and was designed by UCL PhD student-turned-lecturer Dr. Myles Harris. I am looking foward to telling the story of this mission through a mixed media exhibition.

“All in all, I am very excited to work with UCL and the borough of Newham on a collection of works that should get both collaborators and viewers engaged with the Marshgate space. I am also looking foward to getting the brand new Marshgate space a little messy as we experiment with different kinds of making throughout the year. 
Dr. David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai (Selection panel member) 
Director: UCL IAS Centre for Outer Space Studies  
UCL Anthropology, Senior Research Fellow | ETHNO-ISS 

Outer Space affects us all, from the technology we use to the setting of our bodily biorhythms as we wake each morning as the Earth turns to face the Sun. The subtly of our relationships to outer space are often hidden. The artist practice of the UCL Space Week Artist 2024, Sarah Fortais magnificently draws our attention to our spacey relations. As a UCL Slade School graduate and a former artist in residence at the Centre of Outer Space Studies Sarah has used bricolage methodology to bring together materials to help us think through space and the world around us. Her space suits for animals asks us to ruminate on how many more animals, as the subjects of scientific research, have been the main space travellers from Earth. Her work from the UK Space Analogue mission used in situ materials from a Scottish Island that was re-imagined as a Martian landscape for space training to cast death masks and think through how we might conduct rituals in the remoteness of space. Overall, her work is inventive, engaging and goes beyond reflecting on space but challenges us to rethink the co-ordinates of what we know and how we feel about our relationship to all manner of things that, perhaps, we didn’t even realise, are entwinned with space.

Visit the World Space Week website to find out more.

About the Gaia Public Programme  

The Gaia Public Programme is a cultural programme of performances, talks and specially commissioned arts projects which interrogate the many challenges that our planet and humanity faces, while celebrating the potential for future living.

Drawing on themes including the impact of climate change, mass migration, technological advancements such as AI, sustainability and community action, the programme brings together artists, communities and UCL East’s research, in an accessible arts-led public programme.

1.8 million times smaller than the real Earth, Gaia is a permanently installed artwork which embodies UCL as London’s Global University and is located in the atrium at UCL East Marshgate.  

Artist Luke Jerram designed Gaia for people to ‘see the Earth as if from space; an incredibly beautiful and precious place. An ecosystem we urgently need to look after – our only home’.  

Creating a sense of the ‘Overview Effect’, first described by author Frank White in 1987, the experience includes a feeling of awe and renewed sense of responsibility for the planet, as well as a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life.
Inspiring a new public programme at UCL East, Gaia acts as a visual reminder of our place on this planet, and our collective need to protect it.
Find out more on the UCL East website.