Featured in Labocine’s Cosmovision May 2025 issue, a trilogy of films born from the enduring collaboration between filmmaker Rowena Potts and writer Ceridwen Dovey charts a deeply personal and poetic course through our relationship with outer space. These works, at once intimate and speculative, collapse the distance between Earth and cosmos, inviting us to listen not just to data and discovery—but to memory, grief, and planetary kinship.
In Memorabilia, a daughter sifts through the inheritance of her father’s obsession with space collectibles, falling under the quiet spell of 'flown' objects once touched by the void. Through the Powerhouse Museum’s archive and a fictional voice-over by Matilda Ridgway, the film explores how earthly grief clings to celestial artifacts, blurring the lines between mourning and myth-making.
Memorabilia (Ceridwen Dovey, Rowena Potts, 2023)
Requiem shifts to the edge of space, imagining the final days of the International Space Station before its planned descent into the Pacific. Real astronauts lend their voices to a poetic farewell, blending archival imagery with original verse to reflect on what it means to lose a home in orbit—an emotional terrain rarely explored in conversations about space infrastructure and exploration.
Requiem (Rowena Potts, Ceridwen Dovey, 2023)
Finally, Moonrise offers a striking provocation: what if the Moon could speak? Composed as a surreal and lyrical monologue, the film critiques the looming commercialization of our satellite, weaving together a montage of lunar imagery with a poem by Dovey. As private interests eye the Moon’s resources, Moonrise becomes a haunting call to consider the ethical implications of our celestial ambitions—and the silences we’ve imposed on the very bodies we seek to claim.
Moonrise (Rowena Potts, Ceridwen Dovey, 2021)
Together, these films form a constellation of speculative nonfiction—meditations not only on what we seek in space, but on what space might reveal about us.
About the artists
Rowena Potts is a filmmaker and visual anthropologist with a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from New York University. Her short films have explored a range of topics, from the relationship between people and animals in urban settings, to the legacy of an infamous literary hoax in Australian cultural history. Her observational portrait of two pigeon breeders (They Come Home, 2017), won the Grand Jury prize for documentary short at the Independent Film Festival in Boston. She holds a graduate diploma in documentary from the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Religion from Harvard University.
Ceridwen Dovey is a fiction writer and essayist based in Sydney. She’s the author of several works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, and Life After Truth), and non-fiction (On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers and Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The Working Lives of Others). Her essays have been published by newyorker.com, the Smithsonian Magazine, WIRED, the Monthly, and Alexander. She won a prestigious 2020 Australian Museum Eureka Award for her long-form essay critiquing the commercial push to mine the Moon, and she won the 2020 UNSW Press Bragg Prize for Science Writing for her essay on Moon dust.
