Where to Go
12 wall sculptures
Stainless steel, found stones & sea shells
The thirteen sculptures of the series Where to Go (2016) associate traditional Polynesian and Micronesian nautical charts with data from the Kepler telescope mission. On these stick charts created as early as 1000 B.C. and used to navigate the Pacific archipelagos, islands are represented by small shells at the intersections of sticks, and ocean swells by diagonal and curved sticks. The Kepler spacecraft, meanwhile, was launched in 2009 by NASA to discover and study exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) orbiting other stars in our galaxy. Inspired by its findings, with these thirteen sculptures Adrien Missika maps out not the sea, but the cosmos and the location of potentially habitable exoplanets, here represented by lava rocks, pieces of marble, and seashells that the artist has collected over the course of his travels; their orbits are represented by thin strips of stainless steel.