Marjolijn van Heemstra i.s.m. De Correspondent - Maankoorts

What is space worth?

Where does greed come from? What drives man to appropriate distances? And how do we prevent the moon from becoming an industrial area serving a handful of earthlings? In Maankoorts, Marjolijn takes her audience on a journey through these questions. The performance is based on the essay What is space worth (De Correspondent).

In 1923, Aarnoud van Heemstra, governor of Suriname, stood on top of the Voltzberg, a high rock in a sea of green, after a difficult journey through the rainforest. The overwhelming beauty of the landscape did not seem to interest him. What Van Heemstra did see were economic opportunities. He would fell trees en masse, build roads where water once meandered and open up land in search of valuable raw materials. His governorship would be dominated by mining, which left devastating marks on the landscape.

A hundred years later, the first contracts are signed for mining on the moon. Marjolijn van Heemstra, family of the governor, looks at the history and future of colonial mining. In a poetic journey of thought, Marjolijn unravels the greed to which even space is now subjected. In contrast, she writes a loving ode to the alien landscape that we all look out on.