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Lunar Dreams: Space Travel, Nostalgia, and Retrofuturism in A Space Exodus and The Lebanese Rocket Society

Abstract:This paper traces how space travel, as a dream of the past, is imaged and imagined in the work of Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour and Lebanese artist and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. I offer close readings of individual artworks and analyze how conceptions of national belonging, individual and collective aspiration, and complex rapports with temporality are fractured, rethought, and grappled with. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's compelling conceptualization of nostalgia, I analyze notions of national belonging, individual and collective aspiration, and complex temporality as constitutive features of these artworks. Sansour uses sf tropes to articulate the Palestinian plight in A Space Exodus (2009), referencing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Neil Armstrong's iconic moon landing, to claim the moon as Palestinian territory. Sansour's retrofuturist invocation of what Paweł Frelik has called a “future past,” is a site of both possibility and commemoration, in which notions of colonialism, home, and national trauma are echoed as much as they are troubled. In their documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012), Lebanese artists Hadjithomas and Joreige are torn between nostalgia for the modern utopia promised by the 1960's Nasserist Pan-Arab dream and the struggle to represent an actual imaginary for the future. I suggest that in both films longing for what lies beyond the stars is not necessarily found in the future, but is sometimes found in the nostalgia of a future past.