Carey Averbook

Multimedia Visual Storyteller

www.careyaverbook.net

As We Look Down

Follow Hire

Location: Oakland, CA

Nationality: United States

Biography: Carey Averbook (she/they) comes from a long line of Ashkenazi Jews who came to this land, The United States/Turtle Island, while escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe. I'm Jewish, Queer, and from The South. My passions are many, but this website... MORE

"From our point of view, space is filled with mystery ... but in that moment, it is blackness and death. In this moment down here, as we look down, [Earth] is life and nurturing. That's what everybody needs to know."
- William Shatner

The International Space Station has a camera that streams onto an app available to Apple and Android phones. For about a year, I would open the app and look down upon myself, my home, my mother before all mothers, Earth, in the backdrop of what seems like a black abyss of the cosmos or blown out in the light of the fire in our sky, the sun.

Often I could deeply feel the ways that my body is perfectly made to live on Earth and what that means; that gift. My body is the perfect suit made up of the same elements of the planet, in order to live on this planet, my bodysuit for Earth—my earthsuit. Such moments of reverence, bewilderment, and awe became screenshots.

Sending a camera into space, we look down on ourselves, seeing ourselves in new perspective, available to anyone with a smartphone. Sometimes the camera is reflected to itself, we catch ourselves looking at ourselves, finding ourselves reflected to ourselves from space as we do on Earth. We will always find ourselves reflected in nature, because we are nature.

What do you see looking down?

What do you feel?

What is it to see ourselves looking at ourselves?