‘Sex in Space’ Uses Erotics to Confront Cosmic Colonization

The great achievement of the new right has not been its rhetoric of fear but its audacity to hijack the utopian imagination, once tied to the pursuit of alternative ways of living together and a potential emancipation from capitalist structures. Privatized space tourism turns the dream of a new world into a luxury escape route: as billionaires destroy the planet, they design the means to flee it, modelling collective desire without ethics. In this context, ‘Sex in Space’, curated by Bernardo José de Souza at Isla Flotante in Buenos Aires, arrives as a sly provocation. The question embedded in its title is not logistical (‘How do you do it in zero gravity?’) but ideological: can intimacy survive the gravitational pull of capital’s cosmic fantasies?

De Souza, Brazilian-born and Spain-based, assembles 26 artists from Latin America, the US and Europe whose works destabilize the sanitized iconography of conquest. If desire’s empire has always pointed its rockets (those phallic emblems propelled as much by fantasy as by combustion) upward, ‘Sex in Space’ tilts the lens back down. Verticality has long structured power, yet the exhibition overturns that logic: Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s ^ (2012) projects a triangular beam of light onto an uneven gold surface that mirrors its shape; in Autorretrato entre o céu e a terra (Self-Portrait Between Heaven and Earth, 2024), Fe Ávila places a photograph on the floor depicting a bare back crawling upward through the dense foliage of a tree, as if swallowed by the canopy or the night sky behind it. In Untitled (Stripes, Blue, Light Blue, Grey, White) (2025), Daniel Jacoby suspends a crumpled bath towel from a doorframe corner, as if thrown aside and frozen in motion. The gallery feels like a spacecraft in disarray, in which visitors move as co-passengers. By destabilizing hierarchies of touch, gaze and orientation, the exhibition constructs a queer habitat, an interior orbit where subjectivity spins off course.

Mariela Scafati’s Tribu (2025), an articulated form assembled from joined stretched canvases to approximate a human figure, hangs freely in mid-air. It is bound with rope, recalling Japanese shibari, and blue canvas strips. Its posture evokes eroticized control, while the taut surfaces act as a proxy for the body, collapsing distinctions between form and flesh, surface and skin. Nearby stands Eduardo Costa’s Fashion Fiction 1 (1966–2001). This 24-karat gold sculpture, designed to be worn over the ear, functions as a fetishized artefact, revealing how prosthetic extensions and aesthetic interventions encode commodification and objectification. These works confront the body as a site of fabrication, libido and constraint. Humour, too, pulses alongside erotic tension: Gustavo Torres’s Dry Cosmo (2022) enlists a robot vacuum cleaner to ferry cocktails around the room, while Valentín Demarco’s Pozos Q.Z.O.S. (2025) folds bronze into a series of suggestively anal voids.

There is no longing for modernist utopias that once imagined space as a site of technological salvation, nor any naive belief that art might restore them. Instead, Sex in Space asks what surviving affects remain uncolonized, even as capital annexes the stars. Perhaps the most radical eroticism is not extraterrestrial but intra-terrestrial: learning to touch differently in a world already off-kilter. Between speculation and sweat, between the dream of flight and the mess of flesh, the exhibition wonders not whether astronauts can synchronize their movements but whether we can suspend inherited coordinates of desire, domination and meaning.

‘Sex in Space’ is on view at Isla Flotante, Buenos Aires, until 5 November.

_{Main image: ‘Sex in Space’, 2025, exhibition view. Photograph: Santiago Orti - Diego Spivakow}