The following essay is being published in conjunction with the “(In)hospitable Space Conference” which explores the human dimensions of space exploration and is cosponsored between the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, and the European Astrobiology Institute.
All opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not express those of my employer or institution.
A long, thin metal spire mounted carefully on the back of a large truck rolls slowly through the streets of Beirut, flanked by the vehicles of police and security officials. It looks like a missile; if active, it could be used as a missile – there is easy cause for concern, and the replica rocket’s artists understand this. The mayor has been informed and the public alerted. The ambiguity is part of what gives the sculpture power; in a Lebanon far more familiar with active weaponry than with the history of its own former rocket society, the artists argue, constructive discussions about hope for the future must address realities of both past and present.
In addition to the rockets this art piece was patterned after, there are many different ways of visualizing space in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, or of using space as a symbol for other suggestions about the future. Dubai’s Museum of the Future exemplifies several such gestures. The documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society and the short film Space Exodus embody very different modes of thinking about past and future. By examining these three different representations of space media in-depth, the first a public-facing, money-generating enterprise, and the other two closer to the realm of visual art, we can observe patterns and isolate examples of the ways retrofuturism and nostalgia emerge – and what they achieve – in the idea and work towards outer space in the MENA region.
The Museum of the Future
The term “Gulf Futurism” was coined in 2013 by American-Qatari artist Sophia Al-Maria and Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Qadiri. It is used to describe the philosophy and practice of the breakneck-speed, oil-driven deep urbanization of regions of the states bordering the Persian Gulf. The phrase is not meant to be monolithic or insist on a singular, central expectation of the future, rather it describes many different futurisms tied to the history and geopolitical orientations of areas around the Gulf.2 Visually recognizable manifestations of Gulf Futurism include mammoths of engineering like the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and the Palm Jumeria, a human-made, palm-shaped archipelago, also the largest of its type; each are described as artificially pushing the boundaries of humanity and bringing the future to pass.
One of the most striking and overt manifestations of Gulf Futurity, however, is Dubai’s Museum of the Future, an oval-shaped architectural landmark hosting an experience that claims both to imagine the future and that the future is already here. Museums, while sometimes focusing on art or science, are nearly always museums of the past; this experience deliberately reverses and toys with this expectation, repeatedly signalling to its audience that this is something they’ve never seen before.
The Arabic calligraphy engraving the outer shell of the building comprises of quotes by Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and leader of Dubai. The quotes include “The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it and execute it. The future does not wait. The future can be designed and built today.”
The Museum’s website gives potential viewers an immersive, sweeping, parallax-scrolling graphic scape to scroll through, prefacing the journey with the statement: “To reimagine the future, we must be open to new possibilities. Join us on a journey to 2071. Pioneer new worlds and ways of living, and return to shape today’s world for the better.”
The year the museum is set to represent is highly significant: it is one hundred years after the UAE’s founding. Writer and reporter Ahmed Elbenni observes the importance of this: “Note the circularity of it all: 2071 is made into a world-historical watershed by the political coincidence of 1971, and 1971 is in turn eulogized by its relationship to the world-historical watershed of 2071.”3 The complicated circularity expressed in the Museum’s choice of timeframe representation is a common theme in Gulf Futuristic modes; time “cannibalizes” itself – it never quite repeats, but it never quite moves forward. Life is ouroboros.
The language throughout the site overtly and repeatedly stresses the idea of “sustainability.” An examination of the web presence of SAP, the business logistics company partnered with the Museum of the Future to create some of its exhibits, sheds light on the intentionality behind this choice:
While SAP helps organizations of various capacities to run better, the OSS Hope Simulator provides us with the opportunity to directly engage with individuals of all ages to showcase how innovation can enable a more sustainable and brighter future. In addition, the installation sheds light on SAP’s solutions that support its sustainability goals, highlighting the synergy between humans and technology and reinforcing our belief that selecting optimal solutions for a sustainable future requires human compassion combined with data-driven insights. Ultimately, it acknowledges that technology can help address some of the most profound environmental, economic, and social challenges of our time.
SAP’s emphasis on sustainability is explained as the direct result of a company survey: “SAP also announces results of new sustainability survey as it hosts SAP NOW event at the UAE landmark | 96% of companies surveyed recognize sustainability as important to the success of their business, with 52% describing it as vital.”5 Emphasizing sustainability is important for business, but details about what sustainability means or how a system can become sustainable are noticeably lacking on both the Museum’s site and SAP’s site. In considering the Museum’s likely target audience, it seems reasonable that the lip service to sustainability is attractive to both tourists and those with business assets, perhaps ideally tourists with business assets; there is no sense that the focus is a “we’ve gone too far” sort of restorative sustainability, or one tampered with any other kind of real concern, simply an aesthetic.
Moving downward through the Museum’s online exhibit sample, under the “Discover New Worlds” heading, a “Pioneer” in a pink and blue suit, notably not similar to the 1960s U.S. suits or some sort of cowboy aesthetic, as might be expected in the U.S., but of perhaps a Japanese animated character, with whimsical frog-like eyes and a gaping mouth where the human “Pioneer” would look out from. The space explorer is recognizable but unfamiliar; like the rest of the Museum of the Future’s web presence, there is almost nothing clearly retrofuturistic or nostalgic. Time is too unrooted for that.
Space Exodus
A piece of media that stands in steep contrast to the Museum in several ways is Larissa Sansour’s 2009 retrofuturistic short film, A Space Exodus. Its most striking scene by far features Sansour clad in a classic white spacesuit (with some clearly presented twists, a Palestinian flag and upturned moon boots, notably) gallantly plunging the Palestinian flag into lunar soil. Though this set of shots alone is enough to establish clear links to the past and either a future or an alternate reality, the other details of the film reiterate this aesthetic; an analog cockpit full of blinking buttons illuminates the opening scenes, and Sansour floats slowly and dramatically through frames reminiscent of Apollo or International Space Station footage.
One way to describe retrofuturism is something that “functions predominantly as a worldbuilding mode…that specifically exploits the tensions between ideas about the future from our historical past – either actual predictions or fictions of the time – and notions of futurity expressed in contemporary narratives.” Ursula Le Guin described science fiction as a “carrier bag,” a vessel within which to transport and defamiliarize ideas and speculations about politics, social dynamics, or any other topic normally reserved for nonfiction.8 Retrofuturism may be a way to sharpen this use further, a carrier bag within this carrier bag.
Though there are different definitions of science fiction, a common agreement amongst them is that the featured premise could come to pass with the right technology, in contrast to fantasy, wherein the story takes place in another kind of world entirely. Within sci-fi, everyday ideas portrayed in literature and film can perform in fictional modes: “[S]tatehood in A Space Exodus is itself a fiction, a grand gesture taking place on the moon in which its sole witness is lost in space.”9 The idea of statehood seems perhaps to drift off with Sansour into space, as she radios expectantly back to a stable, tractable present (“Jerusalem…Jerusalem?”) and receives no response.
The Lebanese Rocket Society
The eponymously named documentary about the Lebanese Rocket Society deals very directly with both history and the future, and sometimes both at the same time. The documentary conveys much of its investigation into the history of Lebanon’s rocket program through overtly nostalgic modes. Black and white photographs and film reels in archives help root the viewer to both the past and the filmmakers experience of unearthing this history. Much of the story is narrated through the form of oral history interviews with elderly men who had some link to the original rocket society, which began in 1960; the interviewees are often in their homes describing their memories or walking the interviewer through photographs or memorabilia preserved from the program. This interview and archival footage and the overall historical orientation of the documentary is in noticeable steep contrast to expressions of space in Gulf Futurism’s effort to exist in a floating present that is also shot through with the future. While nostalgia is often criticized for slowing change, particularly positive change, in this case it makes the viewer feel rooted and stabilized.
The hope described by witnesses about the program at its birth and development seems noticeably not dead; the feeling is of an “already not yet”; several people speculate on what the program could have done had it been able to continue. One interviewee discussed nostalgically past hopes for scientific accomplishments — perhaps the program could have launched first a mouse, then a dog, then finally a human.
A critical feature of the program, deeply and personally important to some of the founders, was the involvement of students who were survivors of the Armenian genocide. Through the lens of the interviewees’ memories and the existing archival records, the program seemed inspiring in a very real sense to people in various groups at the time, a symbol of hope along many different axes. There was hope that students would become interested in science and engineering and find this a meaningful outlet both to learn and contribute, and there was hope that the rocket society could help Lebanon bond as a nation after the destruction and fragmentation caused by U.S. troops trying to block USSR materials support of Nasser (there is perhaps some irony here in the fact of the U.S. and USSR also being states heavily invested in rocket technology at that time). Writing after the successful launch of one particular rocket, a local journalist optimistically pronounced, “If these four young students can build rockets, so can every student in every Arab country.”11
For Egypt and Israel, both at open war at this time and also invested in rocket technology, rocketry had overtly military rather than scientific goals. According to the Society’s founders, Lebanon’s goals were scientific, academic. While the Navy monitored safe trajectories of rockets (one landed dangerously close to a boat and received concern from officials), all work on rocket technology seems to have been done by university affiliates. Understandably, there was some concern even among university faculty about the motives behind the work; one former faculty member expressed that he had first been concerned when his daughter came home from school with residue from mixing covering her arms and hands. He was reassured that the project was about promoting science, not violence, and while some of his concerns remained, he was willing to accept that the popularity of the program was good for the health and growth of the university.
The film ends with the directors undertaking their ambitious creative project to remind Lebanon of its hopeful past project. After careful discussions with several high-ranking officials, they undertake the installation of the replica rocket they’ve created at the project’s home, Haigazian University. The artists clearly understand the danger of something that looks so much like a missile, but they are determined to remind the nation of a time when that symbol meant something much more hopeful. One director explains, “Outwitting reality, provoking it, defying it, transforming it, as a tribute to our dreamers, [we’ve created] a rocket. But this is not a weapon. This is the fruit of what we were, of what we can still be today: researchers, utopians, dreamers.”
Through analyzing media representations of space in Arabfuturisms, we gain the idea that hope can often be best established when the past and present are stable and acknowledged. The spinning instability of Gulf Futurism comes from its lack of context; its instability is furthered by goals with little definition to them, like “sustainability” in the cases discussed.
Retrofuturism can serve as a way of calling up the past and can be used to combat this rootless timelessness. By establishing a stable past and present and grounding speculation about the future in realities of lived experience, hope stands a better chance of taking root, sprouting, and beginning to flourish. Remembering the rockets of yesterday helps us to hope that missiles may again return to being engineering projects built by students and bound for space.
