Art And Design - We Colonised The Moon

As 2019 marks fifty years since man first landed on the moon, we look at a collaboration between a fine-art printmaker and a new-media artist and the creation of a project that embodies a child-like wonder of the universe. Employing a range of DIY production techniques, their ‘Moon-project’ is rooted in absurdism, where installations and inquiries are characterised by slogans and catchphrases

- Hagen Betzwieser, Sue Corke and Kaiwan Mehta

We Colonised the Moon is a project that grew out of a collaboration between German artist and designer Hagen Betzwieser and English artist and printmaker Sue Corke. The artistic practice of Betzwieser, which has often been of a collaborative nature as much as his individual explorations, produces a large body of objects and experiments. A visit to his studio or a peep into his box of diaries and archives is like taking an exploration in a forest or a dense city, discovering crisp yet unfinished conversations ready to be picked up with the next guest visiting the object or experiment in his studio or box. The ‘Moon-project’ is a similar series of explorations that brings debates between art and science, design and nature, and the life of an artist from two strong traditions of thinking on these debates — German and the English histories with nature, world and colonialism, science and precision, craft and design.