Sex in Space

12/10/2025

Isla Flotante
Viamonte 776, Piso 2, C1213AAL
Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Sex in Space
Por Bernardo José de Souza

¿Podrían dos cuerpos mantener relaciones sexuales en gravedad cero? ¿Qué pasaría si el mundo se pusiera patas arriba y nuestros cuerpos y mentes se vieran obligados a reaccionar ante una realidad completamente nueva?

- Sex in Space busca investigar no sólo una atmósfera completamente nueva, sino sobre todo nuestra capacidad, como seres humanos, para remodelar las interacciones con otros seres, otras tecnologías y otras materias en ámbitos imprevistos de la existencia, desligados de lo que antes se consideraba nuestro terreno seguro. Menos preocupado por el acto real de copular en el espacio exterior y más interesado en nuevas formas de ver, sentir y comportarse, este proyecto se inspira en los viajes espaciales —y en el impulso de alcanzar otros mundos— para reevaluar las nociones de realidad, ficción y deseo. Con este fin, la exposición reunirá una gran cantidad de obras de arte que se alejan de nuestros terrenos terrestres en busca de frecuencias de comunicación inestables que manifiestan tanto inquietud como curiosidad, poniendo en juego la condición humana tal y como la conocemos. -

Participan: Pablo Accinelli, Tamara Arroyo, Felipe Ávila, Anderson Borba, Marina Sula,Eduardo Costa, Valentin Demarco, Jason Dodge, Maurício lanês, Daniel Jacoby, Lisa Jäeger, Raimundas Malasauskas, Ursula Mayer, Elena Narbutaite, Carolina Pimenta, Lucia Pizzani, Luiz Roque, Sara Ramo, Andréia Santana, Ilê Sartuzi, Mariela Scafati, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Juan Diego Tobalina, Gustavo Torres, Francisco Trêpa.

Sex in Space

By Bernardo José de Souza

Could two bodies engage in sexual intercourse under zero gravity? What if the world turned upside down and our bodies and minds were forced to react to a new reality altogether?

Sex in Space seeks to investigate not only a whole new atmosphere but foremost our capacity, as humans, to reshape interactions with other beings, other technologies, and other matter in unforeseen realms of existence—untethered from what once were thought to be our safe grounds. Less preoccupied with the actual act of copulating in outer space, and rather interested in new ways of seeing, feeling, and behaving, this project draws inspiration from space travels—and the urge to reach out for other worlds—in order to reassess notions of reality, fiction, and desire. To this end, this exhibition will amass a plethora of artworks that depart from our earthly grounds aiming for unstable frequencies of communication that manifest unrest as much as curiosity, putting at stake the human condition as we have come to know it.

Whilst very little is known about sex in manned missions to outer space, we know for a fact that human desire is the main force to propel explorations of various natures, either in literature, cinema, science, or life itself: be it creating other worlds, finding new galaxies, reaching out for other life forms, or even digging into black holes. As a metaphor for the human yearning for the unknown (or as a dream coming true), Sex in Space is destined to expand perceptions of how life could be felt and lived otherwise if we were capable of altering perspectives over our so-called nature, and culture. By denaturalizing reality, we may discover other ways of being together.

***

Sex in space remains a tacit taboo. No one talks about it—and presumably no one has ever had sex in outer space.

NASA has never revealed any research on the well-known odds of attempting to engage in sexual contact in a zero-gravity room, although speculation allows us to imagine that synchronizing the movements would be a difficult, if not impossible task—not to mention the amount of sweat produced by the human body under such conditions. Apparently, there would be bulky drips of sweat floating around, splashes of human sticky secretions all over the room, besides the thick layers of grease covering the lover's skins.

Much has been said about cosmic sex between astronauts in space missions, although nothing has been confirmed yet. In the year 2000, an article in The Guardian, by Jon Henly, referred to a book published by French science, space and astronomy writer called Pierre Kohler who claimed that both US and Russian astronauts had enjoyed sex during separate important research programs into how humans might survive several years in orbit.

"According to Kohler's book, there existed a confidential NASA report, to which he had gained access, on a space shuttle mission in 1996 during which a project codenamed STS-XX was to explore precisely which sexual positions were possible in a weightless atmosphere; two guinea pigs had reportedly tested the 10 positions deemed most suitable for a spot of the old zero-gravity how's-your-father. The report, again according to Kohler's book, concluded that only four positions were in fact possible in space without "mechanical assistance" (the missionary position was not one of them). It added, tantalizingly, that a videotape, albeit censored, existed of the experiment."

These claims ended up deemed as pure hoax by the space agencies of both nations. Who knows?

***

Since the late 19th century, modern western cultures have begun to entertain the idea of reaching out for other worlds, most notably in the seminal novel De la Terre à la Lune (1865), by Jules Vernes—a fictional pursuit later expanded by various other forms of literature, film, and actual political dispute. Interesting enough, some of the most praised sci-fi books to address space travels—such as the above-mentioned title and H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1900)— will somehow bring politics into play, turning an ancestral metaphysical quest into a rather down to earth matter. If in Verne’s novel the space enterprise was conducted by a society of weapons enthusiasts (the Baltimore Gun Club), in the Wells’ saga a businessman operates as its key narrator. Be that as it may, later in the 20th century what once had been food for thought and speculation, ended up fueling the engines of real rockets destined to fulfil the supremacist dreams of two superpowers (URSS and EUA) during what was to be known as the Space Race: landing on the Moon thus became their primary mission and utmost destination—a dispute driven by ideological, economic, and political control over other nations around the globe.

More recently though, new colonial ventures in outer space gained momentum in the aftermath of climate change, the fear of exhaustion of natural resources and mass extinction on planet Earth. Such new horizons, however, less than a solution for all of humankind, materialize as an elitist escape route personified in the figure of Elon Musk—the big tech tycoon whose billions have been diverted to make Mars a new home for the wealthiest 1%. During this ongoing era of vertical expansions towards the Moon, Mars and beyond, the patriarchal drive behind such colonial and expansionist enterprises eventually brings into question the often-ignored underlying sexual impetuses infused in these narratives, be they fictitious or indeed real.

Following this cue, the phallic image of a rocket breaking through the atmosphere aiming for unknown realms of the universe recalls children’s repressed feelings towards sexuality, since notions of penetration and invasion are often associated with the coitus. As Darian Leader underscores in his account of western sexuality in the book Is it Ever Just Sex?, “In his discussion of the five-year-old Little Hans, Freud described the boy’s idea of sex as ‘smashing something, of making an opening into something, of forcing a way into an enclosed space’ ”. And he goes on to suggest that such account “uncannily echoes Baudelaire’s threat to Madame Sabatier in his Flowers of Evil to ‘make in your astonished flank, a wide and gaping wound … and through these new lips, more bright, more beautiful, infuse my venom into you, my sister’.

***

Beyond analogies with children’s (as well as adult’s) often sadistic images hidden beneath their sexual drive, the desire to enter new domains, other worlds, and to breach through physical barriers is not only revealing of human’s curiosity but also of the profound fear towards the unknown, which at once repel and propel our imagination.

Sexuality, nonetheless, is a mélange of feelings that involve fear, anxiety, pleasure and, ultimately, relations of power. Therefore, by puncturing the membrane of an outer world, the above-mentioned destructive drive arises, as well as our desire to reach out for the Big unknown, or the unknown Other. And in this sense, notions of alterity, of conceiving of a world different from ours remains one of the most powerful elements in human imagination. How could life be otherwise? How could our psyche and our bodies behave differently? What are the tools to reenvisage the body, its sexual components as well as communal life?

As much as space travels can be invested with neocolonial drives, they also unveil the possibility of making tabula rasa of our past and historical practices and experiences, as suggested by Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Mars — Red, Blue and Green (1992-96), in which the colonization of that planet represents a renewed opportunity to reconfigure political and social relations, be it with nature or to other human beings. Therefore, the economy of objects, images and technologies in this exhibition stand in lieu of preestablished connections between our body, our imagination and the material and symbolic culture surrounding us. By reproposing new forms of connectivity and semantic intercourse, Sex in Space seeks to reassess notions of reality and fiction, reframing the human and its paraphernalia under the spell of an imaginary space travel, or inner travel, if you will. Instead of a minimal environment in the guise of Hollywoodian sci-fi films, a space of accumulation, more attuned to the exiguous (un)reality of actual spacecrafts: myriad of elements that have lost their functionality, thus compelling us to reassign meaning to unforeseen entanglements between humans and artifacts, technologies, and even, perhaps, other species.

On earth as it is on the skies, our bodies and minds are in constant transformation. Under zero gravity though, we can no longer pursue the immutable condition some might aspire to preserve in our planet—instead, a different sense of temporality and spatial relations might arouse in humans a shapeshifting capacity that ultimately might enable us to eschew preestablished roles, and the normativity of sensual relations on earthly grounds. By “dehumanizing” the human, by observing and feeling the transformation of our bodies in the midst of a whole new atmosphere, we may eventually learn how to behave openly towards unacknowledged (or forcefully ignored) forms of existence and desire.