The experiment was failing. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian was in a collapse Spain, one outfitted to resemble the floor of a international planet, and she or he knew it was time to drag out. The objective had been to check how three folks— Ben Hayoun-Stépanian and two of her doppelgängers—would type a brand new society in house utilizing their views as folks whose lives have been touched by colonization right here on Earth.
“My doppelgängers only stayed with me two nights, then they left because we had to abort the mission,” says Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. “There was a whole drama situation happening.”
If you wish to know precisely what the drama was, you’ll have to look at Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s new documentary, Doppelgängers³, which premieres this weekend at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Suffice to say, even when the experiment didn’t go as deliberate, it nonetheless proved her level: Humanity’s quest to discover house wants enter from individuals who aren’t millionaires or leaders of presidency house companies.
When she’s not making movies, Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is an artist and the SETI Institute’s “designer of experiences.” One of her objectives is to carry “queer ecofeminist perspectives” to house journey, and with Doppelgängers³ she wished to point out people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—those looking for to commercialize house journey—what it means to colonize the cosmos.
“It’s a call for action, a call for members of the public to take ownership of these futures,” Ben Hayoun-Stépanian says of the movie, “because if you’re not, other people are going to do it for you.”
Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s technique for bringing in these voices is twofold. For one, she spends a very good chunk of the documentary speaking to specialists—planetary scientist Christopher McKay, physicist Michio Kaku, amongst others—about trauma, house exploration, and parallel selves. For the opposite, she depends on her doppelgängers: Lucia Kagramanyan and Myriam Amroun, two individuals who share Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s background however not her lived experiences.
Photograph: Nick Ballón