This motif of the series of landscapes from the planet Mars refers to images taken by the 'Curiosity' rover on Mars in 2014. The exploration of Mars – with the Curiosity Rover since 2012 and the Perseverance Rover since 2020– serves NASA's speculative plans to establish an inhabited space station on the planet in the not so distant future.
Kyriaki Goni translates these images into a sophisticated weaving technique for large tapestries. In Jacquard or Gobelin weaving, each individual warp thread can be laid to the front or to the back. This technique makes it possible to depict motifs in great detail and in many colors. It deliberately quotes the weaving technique of historical tapestries, on which the newly discovered continents such as India, North and South America or the South Seas were depicted.
The labels accompanying the tapestries provide further information. In addition to the coordinates, date and name of the landscape, they explain individual details of the tapestries. Landscape I, for example, has an inserted motif depicting a wagon train from the 'Wild West'. It comes from the historical account of the colonization of America 'Conquering the Wilderness' from 1883 by Frank Triplett.
The text field above the overall motif reads:
Disembodied gaze of scientific objectivity. A colonizing gaze onto a frontier landscape. An observation of the human impact.