Cal Brockel: You’ve described this exhibition as an “anti-War of the Worlds vision.” What do you mean by that?
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: War of the Worlds as a novel is very much the prototype for a lot of encounters we’ve seen displayed, especially in movies, but there was also the radio play with Orson Welles. He used War of the Worlds to stage this story that’s all about survival, where the ‘other’ is the enemy. The word ‘encounter’ is not the right word, it’s a ‘war’. Because most speculative fiction is also rooted in the time it was written, War of the Worlds had some connection with its situation [at the time]. It has been damaging, but it has produced a kind of matrix for further narratives. There is a whole literature, a whole filmography, a whole continuation of the idea it can only be a violent encounter. If you connect it to the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in South America – that became a very violent and annihilating moment – you can understand why H.G. Wells would write this. This fear of the extraterrestrial has been constructed, and I wanted to deconstruct it.

CB: So War of the Worlds is a colonisation story from the point of view of the colonised, and you have a more hopeful interpretation of how that encounter could go?
DGF: Yes. In that sense it’s interesting because, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers? I think this film is very interesting in the way it was trying to explore empathy for the other, but at the same time working with these clichés of militarism. It gives us a possibility to examine the idea of empathy in relation to very different beings.

CB: I think the way Verhoeven used the sci-fi action format makes you, as an audience member, watch it on two levels. You can watch it as social commentary, or you can get swept up in that jingoism, as you would in a lot of films.
DGF: Totally. This is where he’s very smart because there is the film and then the meta-film that is observing.

CB: Did you grow up on sci-fi?
DGF: I really grew up with science fiction; my father was a big sci-fi reader. I think it’s also because growing up in the 70s meant being surrounded by this hippie environment where everything was about possibilities. Feminism was already strong, and ecology. There was a very liberating feeling and the sci-fi I was reading was very connected to that moment. Rather than being stuck in the past, it was examining possibilities – whether sexual, whether in terms of relationships or even rethinking family. Rethinking everything. When you think about the design or fashion of the 60s and then the 70s, there was this whole idea of, “What if things were like this?” And then exploring, being experimental instead of traditional. It’s the experimental side of science fiction and its speculative aspect. You’re so lucky in England to have had this amazing – and still for me a bit mysterious – history of speculative fiction. I know there is a genealogy, and probably Mary Shelley is a very important part of that. For me there’s Katharine Burdekin and the novel Proud Man, it’s about an extraterrestrial coming to Earth and experiencing humans in different ways. Katharine Burdekin is much, much less famous than Wells or [Aldous] Huxley, but she’s so incredible. I also grew up reading a lot of [J.G.] Ballard. It makes me wonder why England produced these writers. I know that some writers will generate other writers, and there is a whole context for that, but I find it very interesting that this island has a reservoir of production.

Bruce Weber poster: £POA

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