Which artists should get a return flight to the moon?

Bizarre artist residencies abound. Spend a few months researching on a volcanic site, or at a waste management centre, or even under the 43 satellite dishes of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. But all of those opportunities are stuck here on Planet Earth, not some 384,400 km above it — like the project announced by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa last week.

Maezawa's an entrepreneur and art collector (he made headlines and broke records when he dropped $110 million USD on a Basquiat in 2017). And he's also a SpaceX customer, the first person to buy a flight on Elon Musk's rocket to the moon, or rather around the moon. The spacecraft, Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), is scheduled to launch in 2023, sending passengers to orbit everybody's favourite planetary satellite, and Maezawa hasn't just nabbed a spot for himself — he's bought out the entire voyage (estimated pricetag: $200 million USD) so that he can offer the seats to 6-8 artists for a combo zero-gravity cruise/international art exhibition that he's calling "#dearMoon."

"If Pablo Picasso had been able to see the moon up close, what kind of paintings would he have drawn? If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today?" Those are a few of the questions Maezawa ponders on the #dearMoon website, where he's credited as "Project Host Curator" — and per the various infographics and timelines available on the site, it would seem that any artists recruited for the voyage will be involved in a #dearMoon exhibition back on Earth at some future date.

There's not much information in the way of how and when Maezawa will be selecting his astronauts, so while the world watches his various social media feeds for an update, CBC Arts approached several land-locked, non-billionaire curators who they would recruit for the trip.

Kenneth Montague

When Kenneth Montague found out about the #dearMoon announcement last week, the whole art-meets-science thrust of the idea was very much his jam. The founder and director of Toronto's Wedge Curatorial Projects also works as a dentist. "I have a strange double life," he laughs, "so I love the idea that art is being paired with science in such a palpable way." In assembling his hypothetical moon crew, Montague took a similar approach to what he does at Wedge, where his collection is all about promoting and exhibiting works that consider Black identity in contemporary art.

"You want creative people to be part of this mission and it's about the reporting back to the planet when you come back," says Montague. "These are people who are going to make creative projects that are certainly going to draw a lot more attention to the project itself."

So who would he bring on the trip? Says Montague: "They're not superstars, but they will be when they come back from this mission," and his list starts with Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, a photographer, activist and co-founder of the For Freedoms super PAC that Montague describes as "a major force in American politics."

"Online, he's a guy who galvanizes people with his public art projects and he's very much about correcting historical wrongs," says Montague."He does these major projects that are sometimes in magazines and billboards and will be in public places like Central Park or whatever. He's also a very articulate speaker when he talks about his work and he's also a super likable person, so you know, he's kind of an artist very much of these times." Someone that "media savvy," says Montague, would know how to reach an enormous amount of people with whatever he creates when he returns to Earth.

And if it's about reaching an international audience, you should definitely invite a pop star. Not any pop star (sorry, not sorry, Lance Bass), but the ArchAndroid herself, Janelle Monae. "I think Janelle Monae's ethos and her philosophy around her music and her performance, her style, is a reflection of her philosophy around Afrofuturism," says Montague. "This idea of what if? What if Africa was allowed to just be and wasn't ever colonized? [...] What if we went to the moon?"

"I just think she'd be great because she has ridiculous creativity, she's young, she has a very 'of the moment' message in her music. She's very bold and unafraid, she's not afraid to talk about her sexuality, she's very genderfluid, she's of colour. There's a lot of things that make her, in a lot of ways, the perfect candidate to represent a whole lot of us out there."

Commercial space travel is just one step toward humanity further exploring the stars — which is why Montague would bring Bouchra Khalili, too, a Moroccan-French artist whose work is about "documenting and depicting the migrations and movements of people on Earth." Her video series the Mapping Journey Project, for instance, followed the experiences of eight refugees as they travelled through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. "It would be a great balance for this interplanetary mission to have someone who cares and is concerned about issues on our own planet and is very much thinking about migration, movement, travel, and thinking about it through the lens of contemporary art."

Sir David Adjaye, the Ghana-born British architect who designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., gets a spot not just because the structures he would build post-flight could "change the way we live" but because of his artistic sensibility. "He always uses history in what he's considering," says Montague. "When we think about the future, I don't think you can move forward without deeply considering the past."

And since Montague's crew is all about thinking globally, he'd be remiss if he didn't include a Canadian, and Nep Sidhu is his pick. "He would be the guy who would be able to design the costumes for the astronauts," he laughs. (Just look at this work that's now on display at Toronto's brand new Museum of Contemporary Art.)

"He's all over the place with astrophysics and his work kind of references a lot of space/time theory and symbolism. He's another guy who's very big on Afrofuturism. He's very, very dynamic in his approach — lots of colours. He's trying to make things look as otherworldly as possible and then we look at our world through this lens of space. I think he's already primed as an artist for a space mission. He's already on his space mission on earth."

Lauren Fournier

Lauren Fournier, a Toronto-based curator and winner of this year's Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, has some mixed feelings about the whole #dearMoon concept. "I don't want to be a party pooper, but I do sort of feel like we just need to focus on what's happening here on Earth, personally," she says, though the trip's potential to literally change an artist's worldview is obvious. "I think there's something to going to space, seeing the Earth, your home planet, from a distance —  that could bring about a different way of thinking about your place in the world and the stakes of your work or what you're doing."

Fournier is the curator of a show called "epistemologies of the moon," a group exhibition that's on at the Art Gallery of Guelph to Dec. 16 — so yes, reaching out to her might seem a little on the nose, though that project wasn't exactly conceived with commercial space travel in mind. "In none of the conversations that I had with artists did we actually talk about the idea of going to the moon," she laughs. The show, she explains, is more about how the moon keeps popping up as a motif in feminist art, or as "an ongoing symbol of colonial potential," as she puts it — but since the artists involved are already investigating and/or representing a few sides of the moon in their work, Fournier included several of them on her hypothetical guest list.

"I do think one thing that connects the exhibition in Guelph and this call to artists to go to the moon is the idea that the moon has this really long history of inspiring people and making them about the limits of what's possible."

What kind of world would her crew imagine? The folks strapping in for a week-long ride are largely feminist artists with a critical view of colonialism, including Gillian Dykeman, who gets a seat because of her video, Dispatches from the Future Feminist Utopia. It's a critique of land-based artworks, "and their colonial and patriarchal baggage" —  but with a little sci-fi and comedy blended in. That playful attitude deserves a seat on the ship.

Yerbamala Collective is a "radical internet-based anonymous collective," whose zine Summoning Spellbook is included in "epistemologies of the moon." Says Fournier: "I think they could really shake things up for the better, keep us on our toes — keep us feeling, thinking, troubling ideas of the moon." S.E. Nash would be on board to conduct experiments in both art and science, since Nash's work often involves food and fermentation. "Would it be possible to ferment something on the moon? What does it look like? What do you eat on the moon?" Chief Lady Bird, another artist featured in the Art Gallery of Guelph show, is also among Fournier's candidates. "The moon is in everything that she paints unless it's a portrait of a man," she says. "[She's] deeply engaged with the moon as a planetary body and a symbol in her work — thinking through the moon as an Indigenous woman artist."

And Fournier was also thinking about the social dynamic on board when she put her list together. Who'd make for great company? "I imagine going into space would be pretty intense, emotional, maybe fearful experience. So it would be cool to have a sense of community," she says — so she's signed up a few close artist friends (e.g. David Garneau and Sylvia Ziemann) and her partner (Lee Henderson) since they research subjects that could tie into the space travel subject matter. "It may be a bit dark, but art often deals with mortality and I feel like when you go to space there's the risk you might not come back," she says. Henderson's work, for example, "engages with mortality in thoughtful ways. His 'death doula-like' practice might be of use up there on the moon."

Ellyn Walker

"Why do people go to Mars or outer space — or even other remote places?" That's one of the big questions guiding Ellyn Walker's picks for a moon-bound dream team. Walker's an independent curator based in Toronto, and as she puts it, her work and studies are "about the ethics and responsibilities of curating" — how people make choices about representation and inclusion — and how those decisions might harm or help communities.

Why does anyone, an artist included, want to go to the moon? "It's to learn about new things and new ways of living — at least, hopefully," she laughs. "I think that's the productive side of exploration. But for me, in order to imagine new worlds, new ways of living, it has to be hand in hand with social justice. So when I was putting together the list I was thinking, 'Who are artists or activists or community members who in their work imagine living differently — imagine better ways of living and being together?'"

Walker's picks include (repeat astronaut!) Chief Lady Bird and her frequent collaborator Auralast, author adrienne maree brown, Dylan Miner and the collectives Ociciwan, Angry Asian Feminist Gang and Shattered Moon Alliance.

"To nerd out on you a bit, space exploration is such a colonial endeavour — its history, the way it's been talked about — and so I think any sort of ethical project that would be about going to space has to have Indigenous artists and activists at the forefront of it so that it doesn't keep replicating these colonial projects." She'd also reserve spots for activist groups Idle No More and Black Lives Matter, though she might have to buy out a few more hypothetical spacecrafts to make room for everyone.

"Collectives that are doing this 'on the ground work' of making our lives more livable — why wouldn't I invite them to space? They're the ones who are going to make space for everyone."