CARBET PLANETARIUM

ABOUT
THE PROJECT

The Carbet Planetarium is an itinerant event that will be travelling around French Guiana in 2023 to gather stories of the sky, between astronomy and cosmology.

The project has been conceived as a constellation of encounters combining scientific, cultural and spiritual knowledge to support the astronomical heritage of French Guiana and its surroundings beyond the space base.

The Carbet Planetarium has been designed as a place for sharing, transmitting and collaborating. An opening onto the Amazonian world through knowledge of the cosmos, this place welcomed the public between heaven and earth, for a programme of intergenerational and intercultural sharing. The aim of the carbet planetarium was to promote the intangible, ecological and cultural heritage of the different communities visited through multidisciplinary exchanges and workshops.

The Carbet Planétarium is also a cinematographic research project aimed at collecting and safeguarding ancestral readings of the sky, while building bridges with contemporary astronomy. Each meeting was filmed and incorporated into the film Des: astres, the first film on Amazonian astronomy in French Guiana, which won a prize from the French Guiana Ministry of Culture, and was screened during the sessions under the domes of the carbets.

As a tool for exploring our contemporary and ancestral relationship with the cosmos, the aim of this 'digital sky box' was to co-create a film on Amazonian astronomy and contribute to the preservation of cosmic memories.

We travelled from Rémire-Montjoly to Camopi, Papaïchton, Terre Rouge, Awala and Iracubo.

ROOTS OF

THE PROJECT

How have the peoples of the Amazon basin, through the ages, approached the heavens, that other vastness overlooking the forest? At a time when French Guiana is home to the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) - a French and European launch pad for rockets and other satellites - its place at the heart of global space policy has left Guiana teetering between pride and bitterness. Local social, economic and environmental issues sometimes clash with the technological prowess of the Kourou space centre.

Who benefits from the Ariane rockets that take to the skies and the satellites that populate our horizons?

What other imaginary worlds inhabit our skies? Ancestors? God(s)? Aliens? Mythological figures?

Surprisingly, recent construction sites for Arianne 6 have unearthed the first palaeontological fossils in French Guiana. The earth's millennia-old memories are dancing. In their tales and practices, indigenous and Afro-diasporic communities keep alive a relationship with the sky and the entire universe that oscillates between sacred, scientific, artistic and agricultural knowledge.

The Carbet Planetarium project is therefore an exploration of technologies and cosmologies that will enable us, over time, to commune with the infinity of space and to read messages in it that will help us to better inhabit the earth. Because the earth and the sky talk to each other. The moon tells us when to plant, prune and cut wood, while the stars guide us through the forest.

This project explores Amazonian astronomical cultures and French Guiana's unique position in relation to global space issues.