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| Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian |
One of the most unusual, complex films presented at this year’s Docs Ireland, Doppelgängers is a visually exuberant effort to bring together ideas around biology, sociology, philosophy, creative art and the exploration of outer space. It’s the creation of Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, who apologises, when we meet, because she’s had too little sleep and is running on caffeine. She thinks it’s making her slower to articulate her ideas, which, to be honest, makes me wonder if I wouldn’t be a little intimidated by her in her ordinary state. Clad in shiny black snake-print, with vivid make-up and elaborate silver jewellery, she’s not what most people would expect of a member of ‘the space community’, as she describes it, and yet her mission in life is to challenge expectations.
The first thing that struck me about her film, I tell her, is how well it suits a point in history when humanity is in a really difficult position. What we need in order to survive and avoid extinction is to have a lot of big ideas. We have to use our imagination in ways that maybe we haven't been doing in order to see different possibilities.
“I think that's really the key message of this film,” she says. “As you probably have noticed in the film, I'm quickly going over what looks like a dominance narrative within the space field, which is Elon Musk trying to bring all of the manufacture which we have on Earth and bringing it in outer space. That's one vision. And then the other vision is the interplanetary species, the idea of colonising one planet after another after another. These two visions are the ones that are getting the biggest media time with audiences, and this is what is being seen as being a representation of what space is and should be. When you see there is a lot of people that work in the sector that are actually preaching something completely different.
“I wouldn't say it’s even radical. I just think this is something that is already happening and has been happening for many years, but it's not getting the platform to be presented to members of the public. So that's what the film was trying to do, to kind of bring in all these different perspectives that maybe seem wild, although they've been there for more than ten years, some of them.
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| Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian in Doppelgängers |
“For example, the idea that you could terraform or you could remove the carbon dioxide so that you could clean up the air, this is not a new idea. This has worked in the laboratory for many years. But when it's being presented to you in the film, it looks like, ‘Is that even real? Is that a real thing?’ It's been there for a long time, and I think that's important to just have that conversation and present that to members of the public as well.”
I tell her that I feel like sometimes when we talk about space, we're really talking about the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s and not about any ideas that we've had since then.
“Correct,” she says. “ And I think the reason why it's like that is because we obviously are still within a patriarchal heteronormative society in which we consider that the majority is white, male, heteronormative, able – per their own terms – and so forth. Well, actually most of us do not rank within that.
“Those ideas came from the industrial revolution and they've been broadcast through colonial behaviour. And so we are now in a position where decolonial practices are part of some of our practices, so we need to start thinking about what's coming after that. You know, once we decolonise, what are the big universal ideals that we are trying to build together as a society? And so for me, outer space is really a place for us to test out critically as well as reflect on what kind of society we want to build for the next five or ten years. Because it's a five or ten year story, right? The next mission on the moon is happening within the next five years. We all need to be involved in that. We shouldn't leave it to the businesses of our world to make decisions on our behalf.”
There’s a scene which explores the idea of making room for everybody in the colonies of the future, with the inclusion of trans women as an example. I explain that what interested me is how that relates again to those older ideas. Space exploration has often been a very right wing narrative about hard work and men protecting women and women just producing as many babies as possible in space. That seems very primitive now.
“I agree with you. I think that is a primitive idea,” she says. “Yet it is finding a lot of traction. Obviously, Trump and the de-equity, diversity and inclusion order that has been sent to all NASA employees in January this year...” She rolls her eyes. “You have obviously trans rights at the Supreme Court in the UK, so you have decisions that are being done by nation states and by politics that are trans-exclusionary, while actually, space and space exploration is all about transformation.
“I think it's really important that Lilit Martirosyan is there to speak about trans rights, but also my key belief – and what I'm currently working on now – is the fact that if we are to live in a post human context, if we have to exist in space, then we need to transform. So to be trans and to exist within non-binary schemes means that you have much more chance of survival within a space context. The space sector should always be about questioning binaries and should always be about questioning systems of preference that we have inherited from the industrial revolution. Also, I don't think that we should set up human settlements on other planets. That's obviously not something that I support, that idea.”
There is talk in the film about trying to find planets where there is no life, and perhaps settling there, which could mean living underground. Was part of the idea of the experiment there about seeing how people react to that psychologically?
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| Doppelgängers |
“We wrote a paper which was on intergenerational trauma in relation to space exploration,” she says. “There are a few places where you can train as astronauts and where we design space mission for astronauts before they go in outer space. Some of them are in the US, others are in Spain. You have some that are in Jordan as well, which are also underground. And they are there to replicate alien territories so that you can actually train like if you are in the real conditions. And so of course they are, they are underground and they are uncomfortable to human existence for the reason that going in space is really about decentring the human.
“If you want to survive in space, you need to take a post human approach. You need to decentre the human. You need to deconstruct all of the systems that we have built. You need to question all of these ideas of privilege that we have inherited from colonial history. This is also partly the creative experiment of Doppelgängers, this idea of deconstructing. So by being three, can we deconstruct, as well the idea of collaboration, the idea of belonging, the idea of origin, the idea of territory?
“It's partly a creative experiment, but it's also a scientific experiment in the sense that we have our saliva being tested all the way throughout the entire experiment. We are being tested as to how we react to certain stimulus from mission control. All of this made it into the paper, so when I made the film, you can see I'm really frustrated because I feel like we don't achieve anything, we don't have a grand vision. I feel like we really missed out on a huge opportunity to reach a new universal big idea. And actually what you find is it's all about self reflection, identity. And so while I wanted to deconstruct this notion of identity, then you come back to a self reflection, you come back to ‘Okay, but where are we as humans? How do we go beyond our capacity?’ The findings in the paper are very different.
“The paper was presented at the Astronautical Congress. It became a session that didn't exist before, called the Decolonial Practices session. So not just film, not just creative experiment, but anyone that is doing decolonial work within the space sector is invited to present in this session. So we really build a platform within the space community and the science community, but also the academic community as well, to build new policy with the sector. So at the end of the day, the film has got an impact, but – at least from my standard – it's not within the time frame of the documentary, which is why I'm really frustrated towards the end.”
In biology, in the film, we find that looking at what we would need in space to make a functioning ecosystem tells us about what we need on Earth and helps us to think about what we don't know about what we have on Earth.
“I work at the SETI Institute, which is a search for extraterrestrial intelligence which has been in existence in 1986, founded by people like Carl Sagan and Jill Tarter – you know, the film Contact with Jodie Foster is inspired by her, and she's in the film as well. And then of course you meet Sylvia Earle [the oceanographer] as well in the film, and the two of them represent the scale of the research scheme, right? From all the way to outer space, all the way down below the sea to understand what we have on Earth, how extremophiles exist and how we can question our understanding of life.
“In the search for aliens, a big part of what we're trying to think about is knowledge and how knowledge is being produced and how knowledge is being understood by humans, and all the blind spots that come with that. Because, you know, a human brain might not think the same way that a fungus thinks, if you agree that there is a form of consciousness there, or bacteria down in the ocean might evolve in that way. And so there is always this question with colleagues when we search for extraterrestrial intelligence: how do we go about doing something like that?
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| Doppelgängers |
“The scientists I work with are looking at how dolphins communicate between each other and how that might inform the kind of frequency that we need to tune our telescope to so we can listen to what might be a signal that comes from outer space that is being produced by intelligence. I'd say we have a good beginning of reflection there, on this planet. But there are also things that we discover by also exploring outside of our cosmos, going into the Kármán zone, going above and beyond, right?
“There is also an opportunity for us through the idea that we are actually moving outside of a certain scale that we are accustomed to, as we also challenge ourselves as a species to think differently about the next five or ten years, for example. So I do believe that there is a value in space exploration, for the purpose that it's expanding our awareness of the blind spots that we might have. But largely we can also get there by going into the deep sea. I see the value in both approaches. You can also discover a lot about outer space by actually going deep down under the sea.”
Coming up: Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian on alien aesthetics, Armenian tradition, disability in low gravity and music created as a curse.
