A crew poses between Aspen trees at the “Aspen Year 2222: The Wild Future Outpost” launch day strategy session on Saturday. The event was the first of many for this year’s iteration of the Aspen Space Station. Spearheaded by local artist Ajax Axe, interactive programming and artistic encounters will commence at various locations around town and in the wilderness through the month of September.
The year is 2222. The West was scorched in forest fires long ago and people abandoned the region. Yet after a period of climate collapse, the forest is regenerating again. A group of ecologists, artists and natural philosophers, known as the “The Burnt States Federation,” have landed in Aspen. And they’re on a mission.
“We are studying what we find around us and developing a more sustainable culture that could potentially live here in the future,” said Ajax Axe, the leading artist and activist behind the Aspen Space Station.
While this scenario may be imaginative, the mission behind it is real.
Axe spearheads an organization called Earth Force Climate Command, a network of artists, activists, designers and thinkers working to prototype and implement community visions and solutions for an Earth-focused future. And she’s inviting the community to come together and participate in the experience.
A participant of The Wild Future Outpost strategy session stands in a space suit during the launch event that took place on the back of Aspen Mountain on Saturday. Colorado- and Kenya-based artist Ajax Axe created the wearable piece from recycled flip flops.
Through efforts of creative activism and artistry, EFCC launched its space station initiative last winter in Lamu, Kenya, followed by the inaugural Aspen Space Station last summer — which featured art installations on the back of Aspen Mountain and community programming around different projects.
The Aspen Space Station is back in orbit for summer 2022 — or rather, summer 2222, narratively speaking. Set 200 years in the future, this iteration, titled “The Wild Future Outpost,” involves 11 local artists as they cultivate interactive exhibitions and immersive experiences at various locations around town and in the wilderness.
“The idea is to have an experiential event schedule that really makes people feel like they’re participants, not just spectators,” Axe said. “A big thing for me with this project is trying to get people to come together and participate and not feel like voyeurs, where they’re just watching something from the outside.”
Captured is an NFT image from visual artist DJ Furth’s new motion series, titled “Portraits Of An Other.” The NFT portrait series depicts a potential future of what humans might look like if they were to merge with AI. As one of the 11 local artists involved in this year’s iteration of the Aspen Space Station, Furth will be premiering his project on Aug. 7.
The Wild Future Outpost launched on Saturday with a strategy session and will continue through September. The programming roster includes art installations, workshops, book clubs, food labs, parties and other events aimed at community building and forward thinking. Most of the events are free and require registration.
Axe — who lives between Aspen and Kenya — said the goal of the space station project has always been to bring the community together around imagining a future that is more rooted in nature and less in materialism.
“It’s an irony of being in the art world, because the art world is so incredibly materialistic,” Axe said. “But, for me, the best thing is when we can be creative together as a community in the wilderness — that’s the magic, when you have a group of people up on the mountain doing something crazy together. … It really makes people feel connected.”
This year’s space station was originally set to take place in and around the historic area of Ashcroft Ghost Town, which is located 11 miles up Castle Creek Road from the roundabout.
“We had some initial ideas for where we were hoping to do the space station this year,” Axe said. “Because of certain permit constraints, it wasn’t possible in the timeline that we had been hoping for.”
Having to find a new location for the space station in a short timespan came with a silver lining: With the Wild Future Outpost taking over multiple locations, it makes for a more “dynamic experience,” Axe said. The artist also formed new partnerships with organizations and institutions, as many offered to host programming for the project on short notice.
“Having conversations about what we want for the future in all different kinds of settings, I think, is going to really help us expand the project,” she said.
Some of this summer’s milieus will include a workshop at the Aspen Art Museum (in late August), a 2222 press conference to be held at Explore Booksellers and an installation at the entrance of the Intersect Aspen art fair. EFCC members will be at the art fair all day on July 31, reciting their pledge and providing attendees information on the project. Artist Chris Erickson’s life-size Fire Pod installation will be at the Red Brick Center for the Arts, and there will be an event on the center’s front lawn featuring the space station artists on Aug. 4.
Other event locations are top secret, Axe said, and will be disclosed upon registration, including the Aug. 7 premiere of visual artist DJ Furth’s NFT portrait series and Clarity Fornell’s “Future Ritual” on Aug. 14 — which will very much be an immersive experience, as participants are picked up from a site in Aspen and blindfolded until arrival at the event’s destination.
For artist Nori Pao’s project, participants will use bamboo styluses to carve messages into clay tablets about what they would want people living 200 years in the future to know. The tablets will then be fired and buried in a location, Axe said, and the space station team will register that location with historic organizations.
Certain activations — such as Furth’s, Fornell’s and Pao’s — will only be open to “advanced futurists,” Axe said. People interested in these events are to take a six-question multiple choice test, called the “Future Proof Exam,” and must score high to attend. Accessed through the EFCC website, the entry exam is meant to get people thinking about their carbon footprint, she explained.
“It’s a playful test, but it’s also quite serious,” she said. “And that’s something we constantly try to do with the project — to be playful about very serious things in order to engage people with issues that are tough for them to talk about or try to work on.”
From its infancy, the space station project has been about experimentation and trying new things on a societal level to prompt communities to think about how to change the future.
The artist explained how the space station model has been a great metaphor for the future — a fun and engaging way to inform communities and allow people to participate in EFCC’s initiative. With more artists and organizations on board for the project’s second go-around in Aspen, Axe is now working to expand beyond just space stations and build a long-term plan for her EFCC organization.
“We’re starting to have more financial support than we ever have,” Axe said. “And the level of enthusiasm for the project from the community has been tremendous — that is giving us a lot of momentum coming into this year.”
The Wild Future Outpost runs through September. For more information on registration and access to the updated schedule of events, visit thefutureisonearth.org or follow @earthforceclimatecommand on Instagram.
