Who owns meteorites from outer space? 

Museon, the natural history museum in The Hague, publicly owns 5 iron meteorites from far ends of the galaxy, which have landed on different parts of the world before they came to The Hague. These meteorites are held in the basement of the museum, which is not publicly accessible. When a meteorite is displayed, it is often sliced open with a straight blade, to show the cross-section of its material. The rest of the meteor is then often destroyed for scientific experimentation, sold off to the black market or major auction houses.

In the installation Meteorite 82149, the question of who gets to own a meteorite arises, challenging the position of the museum as the authority over outer-space objects. The installation presents an intact replica of a numbered iron meteorite from the collection of Museon, first procured from its landing site in Texas: if the meteorite would be on display at the museum, it would likely be cut open. In a wall installation, 120 potential slices of the same meteorite, imagining the fate that would befall the rock if as a sliced and flattened subject for markets and scientific testing. The replicas are 3D-printed out of iron, artificially aged by the artists, through a process that seeks to repeat an accelerated journey of tens of thousands of years in which the meteorite rusted while tumbling through the galaxy. Mimicking the setting of Christie’s auction house, which auctions off slices of the spacecraft to the highest bidder, they imagine a new redistributive mechanism for materials from outer space.