What Would We Do If We Could Start Over?

What Would We Do If We Could Start Over?

A question hangs in the air of Karlsruhe's ZKM Center for Art and Media, and it has nothing to do with rocket fuel.

Tomorrow evening, June 5th, an exhibition opens that refuses the usual Mars narrative. No billionaire escape pods. No terraforming fantasies. Instead, MARS! Mobilizing Awareness for Resilient Societies! asks visitors to design a democratic settlement on the red planet, then notice something uncomfortable: every skill required for that imaginary colony is precisely what Earth needs right now.

The project, developed by ZKM's Hertzlab, has been running since January 2026 through a series of open workshops. Habitat design. Mental health in isolation. Food systems without livestock. Governance structures. Resource management. Each session invited scientists and citizen scientists to prototype solutions for a hypothetical Mars commons. The exhibition opening marks the transition from Phase 1 (prototypes) to Phase 2 (concept exhibition), with a final Phase 3 planned for October: a two-week long-term performance transforming Karlsruhe's market square into Mars Square.

The Signifier Gets Hijacked

Stand in front of most Mars-related cultural production and notice what happens. The imagination narrows. Mars becomes a destination for those who can afford to leave, a lifeboat for the wealthy, a frontier mythology dressed in SpaceX branding. The rest of humanity watches from a burning planet.

ZKM's project introduction makes the intervention explicit:

Rather than being left behind on a burning planet and looking on as the wealthy leave towards redder pastures, we will make Mars a democratic project for the rest of us.

This is curatorial judo. The project takes the most potent symbol of techno-escapism and redirects its energy toward terrestrial resilience. The signifier Mars gets hijacked, repurposed, made to work for different ends.

What makes this interesting for anyone thinking about governance, technology, and European futures is not the Mars framing itself. The framing is a device, a cognitive trick to bypass the paralysis that often accompanies climate discourse. The real content lies in the prototypes being developed and the questions they force into visibility.

Prototypes as Diagnostic Tools

Consider the workshop sequence. January: Habitat. What does shelter look like when resources are scarce and conditions hostile? February: Mental Health. How do communities maintain psychological resilience under sustained crisis? March: Food. If industrial agriculture cannot travel to Mars, what systems replace it? April: Governance. Would capitalism survive export to a new planet, or would different organizational logics emerge? May: Resource Management. How should water shortages be addressed when there is no elsewhere to draw from?

Each question, framed for Mars, lands differently than it would framed for Earth. The fictional distance creates permission to think without the weight of existing institutions, sunk costs, and political gridlock. Participants design for a blank slate, then discover their designs apply to the planet they already inhabit.

This is a form of speculative practice that European cultural institutions have been developing for years, but MARS! executes it with unusual clarity. The project does not ask participants to imagine utopia in the abstract. It asks them to prototype specific systems, then recognize those systems as immediately relevant.

The Commons Question

The governance workshop, held in April, deserves particular attention. The prompt was direct: Would it be worthwhile to export capitalism to the red planet?

The question is not rhetorical. It forces participants to articulate what they actually believe about economic organization, resource distribution, and collective decision-making. A Mars settlement cannot externalize costs to other regions. It cannot rely on growth assumptions that depend on unexploited territories. It cannot pretend that individual accumulation will somehow produce collective welfare.

Whatever participants designed in that workshop, the exercise itself performs a diagnostic function. It reveals assumptions that remain invisible when discussing Earth-bound policy. The fictional frame makes the familiar strange, and strangeness enables critique.

For policymakers and governance scholars, this methodology offers something worth studying. How might speculative design exercises inform actual policy development? What happens when citizens prototype governance structures before experts draft legislation? The ZKM project does not answer these questions definitively, but it creates conditions where they can be explored.

Art Institution as Civic Laboratory

ZKM has long positioned itself at the intersection of art, technology, and society. The institution's various residency programs, including the Rauschenberg Residencies in Technology and Media Art and collaborations with UNESCO Cities of Literature, suggest an ongoing commitment to cross-disciplinary practice.

MARS! extends this positioning into explicitly civic territory. The October performance, when Karlsruhe's market square becomes Mars Square for two weeks, will test prototypes in public space. Citizens will encounter the project not as gallery visitors but as participants in a collective experiment.

This matters for how cultural institutions understand their role in democratic life. The museum or media center becomes not a space for contemplation at a distance but a laboratory for civic imagination. The exhibition becomes a prototype. The prototype becomes a provocation.

What Gets Naturalized

Pay attention to what the project makes visible by making it strange. The assumption that Mars belongs to whoever can afford to get there first. The assumption that crisis response requires centralized authority rather than distributed resilience. The assumption that starting over means escaping rather than transforming.

These assumptions circulate constantly in discourse about technology, climate, and governance. They shape policy without being examined. MARS! creates conditions where examination becomes possible, where the naturalized becomes denaturalized, where alternatives can be imagined before they are dismissed as impractical.

The exhibition opening tomorrow is not the end of anything. Phase 3 in October will push the project further into public space. But already, the methodology offers something worth attention: a way of using speculative practice to diagnose present conditions and prototype alternative futures.

The question What would we do if we could start over? turns out to be less about Mars than about the imagination required to transform Earth. The red planet is a mirror, and what it reflects is the work that remains to be done here.

For those tracking how European institutions are developing new methodologies at the intersection of art, technology, and civic imagination, Human × AI Europe's Content Hub offers related coverage and context worth exploring.