Artwork:
Tuna - Finest Quality

At first glance, Tuna - Finest Quality looks like a playful gesture: a miniature satellite wrapped in a laser-etched label that mimics vintage tuna can packaging. But the work holds a layered reflection on space exploration, consumer culture, and the history of navigation.

The space-ship is using a deployable sail designed to help it re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. In that sense, it behaves much like a seafaring vessel, using friction with the residual air in low Earth orbit to steer its descent much like sails once captured wind to guide ships across oceans. The satellite becomes a kind of modern-day ship, drifting not through water but through near-vacuum.

This connection to maritime exploration adds another dimension to the tuna can metaphor. Like the goods hauled back from long sea voyages—often preserved, canned, and branded for sale—today’s satellites carry data, images, and tools, all packaged in standardized, often disposable forms. The label on the satellite is both an artwork and a nod to how space has become part of the global economy: mass-produced, branded, and circulated.

By wrapping the vessel in a tuna label, the work connects past and present forms of exploration. It merges the aesthetics of pop art and commercial design with the realities of space technology, raising questions about value, permanence, and the narratives we wrap around the tools we send beyond Earth.