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The experiment was failing. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian was in a cave in Spain, one outfitted to resemble the surface of a foreign planet, and she knew it was time to pull out. The goal had been to test how three people— Ben Hayoun-Stépanian and two of her doppelgängers—would form a new society in space using their perspectives as people whose lives have been touched by colonization here on Earth.
“My doppelgängers only stayed with me two nights, then they left because we had to abort the mission,” says Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. “There was a whole drama situation happening.”
If you want to know exactly what the drama was, you’ll have to watch Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s new documentary, Doppelgängers³, which premieres this weekend at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Suffice to say, even if the experiment didn’t go as planned, it still proved her point: Humanity’s quest to explore space needs input from people who aren’t millionaires or leaders of government space agencies.
When she’s not making films, Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is an artist and the SETI Institute’s “designer of experiences.” One of her goals is to bring “queer ecofeminist perspectives” to space travel, and with Doppelgängers³ she wanted to show folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—the ones seeking to commercialize space travel—what it means to colonize the cosmos.
“It’s a call for action, a call for members of the public to take ownership of these futures,” Ben Hayoun-Stépanian says of the film, “because if you’re not, other people are going to do it for you.”
Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s method for bringing in these voices is twofold. For one, she spends a good chunk of the documentary talking to experts—planetary scientist Christopher McKay, physicist Michio Kaku, among others—about trauma, space exploration, and parallel selves. For the other, she relies on her doppelgängers: Lucia Kagramanyan and Myriam Amroun, two people who share Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s background but not her lived experiences.
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Ben Hayoun-Stépanian grew up in France. Her father left Algeria as a child during the Algerian War; her mother’s family was part of a movement in France to raise awareness about the Armenian genocide in Europe. Amroun is Algerian. Kagramanyan is Armenian. So when Ben Hayoun-Stépanian speaks about them as doppelgängers, she means they look a bit like her, yes, but also they represent who she could have been if things had worked out differently for her family. By spending a few days on the surface of a fake planet (the Doppelgängers³ experiment was conducted at Astroland Interplanetary Agency’s fake Mars setup in Spain, where private citizens can learn to be astronauts), she hoped to demonstrate what would happen if people affected by displacement were involved in the decisionmaking about colonizing another world.
In addition to the film, Ben Hayoun-Stépanian plans to present her findings from the documentary in a paper at the International Astronautical Federation’s congress in October. (She serves on the federation’s committee for the cultural utilization of space.) “Often in space agencies, diversity is seen as tokenism,” Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. “But what I’m trying to say in this film is, it’s not about that. This film demonstrates that you must listen to other voices, to people from historical backgrounds that have been traumatized by these kinds of attitudes and behaviors.”
In other words, space doesn’t need more millionaires.
As for that failed mission, it didn’t really fail. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian says Kagramanyan and Amroun called it “the best experience of their lives.” Their mission was to find an underground lake, which they did. They also found life in that lake, but then the question became, “If you find life, are you going to develop a new base close to the lake or do you decide not to do that because you’re trying to not take a colonizing mindset?”
This wasn’t the reason they aborted the mission, though. It stopped because Ben Hayoun-Stépanian fell, and mission control told them to pull out because of the conditions. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian won’t disclose exactly what happened before and after that but says none of it was what she expected. To find out, you’ll have to see Doppelgängers³. Maybe Musk and Bezos will, too.
