The next frontier for the New York-based artist Tom Sachs and his team: Europa, Jupiter’s sixth-largest moon. Sachs—who has previously led “missions” to the moon and Mars as part of his ongoing intergalactic series—is due to unveil Space Programme: Europa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco on 16 September (until 15 January 2017). The show features around 185 objects, including a Japanese tea garden, a full-size Apollo-era landing module, a mission control centre and artefacts from the artist’s previous “space travels”. On the opening and closing weekends of the exhibition, visitors will be able to witness a demonstration by Sachs’s team as they “find life on icy Europa” and experiment on—and perhaps even eat—these newly-discovered life forms, says the show’s organiser, Dorothy Davila. Some lucky visitors will then be served tea by Sachs as part of a traditional tea ceremony, which represents “the primary export of the colonisation programme to Europa”, Davila explains, naming conquest and colonisation as the main goals of this expedition.
