by Maria de Lima

Olimpia, Mars

Since the move to Mars, Olimpia had been reading a book of collected poems by Paul Celan before sleep. It hadn’t been an overly conscious choice, rather the first thing unpacked from the capsule on arrival a year ago. It had suited her mood then, slowly twining a papery tie to the memory of life on Earth. As she flicked through it, looking for where she had left off, she came across a pressed rose, complete with stalk and flattened leaves. The intimacy of the encounter stilled her pointed index finger, softly hovering mid-air over the page. Between the German and English parallel texts a new language had entered the book. Her finger tried to trace it and relay pronunciation to her lips.

In reverie, she had wandered back into the two day old sensation of blooming warmth within her chest that had overcome her as she watched a film on her air screen. An unexpected moment of closeness in what had otherwise been a slightly dull artist’s video on the subject of mutualism, that had risen to collective consciousness during the Earth’s COVID-19 pandemic. Compressed into a sentence, mutualism was an ecosystem theory in which interactions between two or more organisms were beneficial to every party involved. It sat at the opposite end of the table to the Darwinian metaphor, survival of the fittest. Mars had certainly not risen to the utopian vision of mutual care. Its colonisation had come after the mining of the moon for helium, and the same logic of extraction, with its singular benefactor, had founded the human presence on the planet.

Olimpia had been caught up in a fantasy of a future not far off mutualism when she committed to be a part of the cultural division on the third settler mission. On her first week at the Noachis Terra settlement she had attended a gallery opening in an old oxygen tank storage facility by the supply store. It was a tiny space, making a gathering of twenty-five feel like an overbearing crowd. She had squeezed through the gully formed between turned backs and wall, hung with small drawings depicting their martian landscape, finally arriving at the iron oxide-red gravel track outside. There, she had struck up a conversation with a middle aged white man, the gallery owner it had turned out, who after gathering information about her activities on earth told her, in Noachis we like to make sure people are nice. The sibilant scraped on his tongue like a knife flicked.

Urging herself back to the present, Olimpia found that she stumbled once again over the memory of the film screening and the Q&A session that had followed it. The artist’s lack of acknowledgement of the history that allowed his body to circulate without risk or question through space as he lectured on utopian visions of mutual care, boiled up hot in frustration. In the heat of the moment the best she had managed was a fumbled question lumpen with the phrase, ‘white male privilege’. The artist’s face crumpled at the words, leaving her ablaze with guilt. The host of the event chipped in, smoothing over the question. Despite the sales pitch of critical discussion and out of the box thinking, art seemed to be an industry guided by a sentiment of pleasant, conservative celebration. She sat, with pointed index finger softly hovering mid-air, contemplating silence; a rose crushed lifeless in between the pages of an old book.