Suspended in the weightlessness of space and the persistence of time, the piece refers to skies mapped by lines that join distant points, by the tension of parallel lines, by pendulums that oscillate. With a closer look, we can also imagine the space debris orbiting around the Earth, floating inert in the void, objects circulating around the planet, remnants that have lost their way, a drawing of stars, or some scattered thoughts.

While wandering through Hamburg, Chilean artist María Edwards collected different variables for her contemporary diorama. It connects the port’s history of material goods that enter and leave the city with natural elements from the green lungs of the Stadtpark and random objects that came her way, all translated into a “Common Constellation."

The international Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, called the universe “the common province of all mankind” and prohibits any claims of ownership over celestial bodies. Today, private oligarchs plan to colonize space, while millions of junk objects orbit the planet, preventing us from seeing the theater of the stars. Edwards’ diorama reflects the etymology of the word itself: an image one can look through, a miniature that enables us to grasp the scale of the issue. It merges past, present, and future, lightness and weight, density and emptiness, environmental justice, earthly cosmology, and various cosmic laws that invite us to question what we are when we look at the cosmos: an instant in the immensity of space, a spark in the immemorial perspective of time.


María Edwards was born in 1982 in Santiago, where she still lives and works today.

Location of the work on Google Maps