Interview mad at the moment, but this will be the last for a bit. It's with Rowan Smith concerning his recent show at Whatiftheworld called If You Get Far Enough Away You'll Be On Your Way Back Home.

Sloon: It seemed that your previous show, Future Shock Lost had a stronger theme of nostalgia and looking back, while this show, If You Get Far Enough Away You’ll Be On You’re Way Back Home, was much more melancholic without being directed at the past. Sadder.

Smith: That wasn’t intentional, it just came out of the territory. The vast empty void of space. One of my favourite descriptions of outer space was by Michio Kaku, this scientist and writer, as “dark, dusty and empty”. That really is what it is. So, it wasn’t intentionally pushed in that direction, but that is the sense I was trying to evoke.

Sloon: What spurns the obsession with space? Do you not find that similar emotions can come from other places?

Smith: The emotive wasn’t the intention. It was more of a product -a symptom- than a means.

Sloon: The idea of space comes first. Where does that fascination come from?

Smith: It cropped up a little bit in the last show, with the Extensions of the Universe and the Olympus Mons piece. I uncovered material I wanted to carry on using. I was looking at space in the last show from the position of ‘the future’ and how ‘the future’ was produced. How technology produced the future and how that manifests culturally or socially. This show had similar concerns taken over but a much more concentrated focus in terms of concept and content.

Sloon: Did you read a lot of Science Fiction towards this show?

Smith: Not actually, I think I read more previously. I was trying to uncover a lot more academic papers written on space. Only very recently there were two conferences, one held in Europe called, I think, How Space Flight has affected the European imagination. Then NASA held one called the societal impact of space flight. There was really great documentation from that.

Sloon: This show made quite an act of collecting. Like finding the meteorite (Things Fall Down, People Look Up), or getting the moon dust(384,403 Kilometers) and not transforming them into anything. The act of acquisition became quite important. Finding Lunar Hattingh as well.

Smith: In the last show, collecting all that old technology, getting any of that is a long search. What for me was very different about this show was that the methodology had changed. It wasn’t going so much to second hand shops. It was more contacting these institutions overseas. It became a lot more of a social method. Tracking down meteorite hunters and negotiating getting the moon dust down here. Again, it wasn’t something I intentionally did. It was a very alluring thing, to try and get moon dust. I definitely worked through ideas that did transform that or used it in a different way.. Especially the moon dust and the meteorite, I found them quite strange things to work with, because the material is so loaded. The meteorite, the original idea was to carve it into something. Then I moved onto melting it down. But foundries need a minimum of 25kg’s and I only had 2 kgs. That would be so expensive and quite rare to find that much.

Sloon: How much, out of curiosity?

Smith: This cost R1800. But 25kgs would be pretty pricey. It’s not just as simple as melting it down. You have to dehydrogenate the material, and there are all these unknowns because it is an extraterrestrial material. And as a consequence to sending out so many emails, someone somehow had forwarded this email to a geologist in Bloemfontein, and she wrote this really hectic email pleading me not to melt down this meteorite. I was destroying important scientific research, and won’t I send here a small sample. And she actually listed all the Heritage Acts that protect meteorites in South Africa. The meteorite I had fell in Morocco and was found outside SADC countries, but if it had fallen here it would be illegal for me to even own it. That was interesting part of the process. I tried to get it engraved but it was too hard. The guy’s diamond bit barely scratched it. It is really tempered from coming through the atmosphere. It’s a really hard substance. In the end I’m glad I didn’t try and sculpt it, I would have just destroyed the really nice surface it has.

Sloon: It resisted transformation. The Finding Lunar Hattingh work made that process more visible. The negotiation became the work. It’s quite a different way of working for you.

Smith: It was a new way of presenting an idea for me. I was very open to trying that. But the idea made a lot of sense to me in terms of the other work.

Sloon: Tell me a bit about the process of that work, it seemed quite interesting.

Smith: I got a whole load of newspapers from my step-dad. From 1969 the day of the Moon landing, and going through them I found this article that listed this Kuilsriver family naming their child after the moon landing, Lunar Armstrong Hatting. I went through a number of Hattinghs in the phone book.

Sloon: Aren’t they like Smiths?

Smith: Pretty much. It’s ridiculous the number of Hattinghs. Eventually I decided to use a private investigator, which was quite a strange process in itself. He found him in one day. I contacted Lunar Hattingh and asked him if I could use a photograph. He was quite resistant in the beginning. He openly said that he was not comfortable with his image in press. He said I could use this picture, but he wasn’t open to me going and photographing him, in a shoot. I liked the picture that he chose very much.

Sloon: The fish.

Smith: Hunter gatherer. It is almost biblical in a way. Base. Man hunts. Catch Fish. Against the cosmic narratives of the rest of the pieces.

Sloon: He was resistant to showing himself?

Smith: I explained to him on the phone and sent him an email. I sent him a press release and invited him to the show. But I think the idea was quite abstract to him. I don’t really think he understood where it is being used. I really started to wonder how some photographers convince their subjects. Like how Peter Hugo, for example, goes through that process of convincing a subject, or explaining how the subject is being used.

Sloon: It is a process of negotiation. In your work it becomes about the negotiating of those things.

Smith: I didn’t tell him that I used a private investigator yet. It would be quite strange if he did see the show and saw those documents exhibited

Sloon: Don’t you think that is a little unethical?

Smith: I wouldn’t have a problem telling him. I just didn’t want to tell him over the phone. Maybe it was unethical. It was nothing illegal.

Sloon: Does that matter?

Smith: It didn’t leave me with a good feeling.

Sloon: But you still showed the work.

Smith: I guess you take those risks and see what happens.

Sloon: Then the work sold as well.

Smith: Yes, that was also quite strange.

Sloon: That uneasy feeling has just been passed on to someone else.

Smith: [Laughs]. Very much. There was no malicious intent in hiring a private investigator. I just wanted to contact him. I would have been happy with just a phone number, but I got a lot more from the private investigator. Everything in that document shown was censored. There was nothing, no personal information was exhibited about him at all. It was just his name. I would have been interested to see how he responded if he came to the show and wondered what those documents were. I think I could have explained it to him. I wonder if I would be upset by that? I probably wouldn’t be.

Sloon: It is a little bit creepy. An invasion, almost.

Smith: It does feel like that, but unless the investigator was using illegal method it is just basic databases that are a bit better than the phone book.

Sloon: So. Where to now?

Smith: I don’t know. I’m still in that aftermath. When you get so involved in material like that for over a year, I really feel like distancing myself. Doing something completely different. But I slowly feel it creeping back. I probably will just leave it as it is. Other interesting spin offs have come off form it. I contacted Dr Peter Martinez who is the head of the South African Observatory and asked him if he would write a paper for the catalogue. He was too busy but he will write an introduction. We are launching our space program in October. A government funded space program. There are launches of all these space foundations and they are very interested in this art dealing with space narratives. They’re wanting me to getting involved in whatever capacity I can.