In 1947, the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi designed a draft for A Sculpture To Be Seen From Mars, a silent and abstract representation of a human face, one mile long, built up out of the earth and staring out into the cosmos. Two years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Noguchi imagined this piece as the last witness to life on Earth after the nuclear blast. Built out of compacted sand, it gave the viewer a sense that they are seeing the monument from far above, into the now desolate landscape of the planet.

Inspired by the Sculpture To Be Seen From Mars, Sibylle Peters and Felix Jung reinterpret it as a living sculpture growing over the summer in front of the Planetarium and seen from its observation deck. Constructed with fellow Hamburgians, it is a growing organism on the grass surface, a token of peace, an uncanny emoji, a tribute to Noguchi, or a mysterious, environmental mirror, in which we can see ourselves both in our resilience and in our drive to self-destruction. Since the end of World War II, we have lived with the knowledge that humans may end their own existence on Earth. The scenarios of extinction have multiplied and changed, with the climate crisis and ongoing wars, and with them, the new dimensions of planetary responsibility. How, through pacifism, connection, and environmental art, can we continue to look in each other's eyes?


Sibylle Peters is an artist and researcher from Hamburg and the artistic director of Fundus Theater.

Felix Jung is an artist and sailor from Hamburg, interested in various forms of publicness.

Participants Workshop & Podcast

Ammar Alsaleh, Sophia Antkowiak, Tanja Bächlein, Dorothee Bittscheidt, Juliette S. Breuer, Rusanna Buhtz, Arne Bunk, José Délano, Rona Maria Ghiureli, Karin Missy Paule Haenlein, Birte Jacobsen, Waltraud und Manfred John, Alice Joppich, Lea-Elisa Jüttner, Sabine Kullenberg, Tobias Lang, Lew Malzacher, Yanran Meng, Theresa Michel, Annette Pauw, Esther, Joe & Lynn Pilkington, Dagmar Rauwald, Natalya Stupka, Joanna Warsza, Nasim Weiler, Vanessa Wulff.

Location of the work on Google Maps