A meteorite bears witness to the first formation of matter in our solar system. It has remained unaltered since its birth several billion years ago, keeping the memory of the genesis of our environment under its surface. We are confronted with existential questions: What is the world made of? How did it evolve? How do life and complexity happen? As a worldless and indifferent object, the meteorite also serves as a canvas for our projective desires, phantasies and fears. Its random appearance, regardless of time and place, often helps preserve a fragment of the past, offering a perspective on our history and culture. The Thunderstone of Ensisheim, which fell in France in 1492, was chained to the wall of the local church. In 1954’s Alabama, a meteorite struck a woman resting on her couch, inducing a storm of publicity she wasn’t emotionally prepared for. In 1992, inhabitants of Mbale, Uganda, were eating the fragments of a meteorite shower, as they believed them to be a divine cure for Aids. The fascination for these sculptural time capsules has taken me on a journey. The photographs, or ‘thought images’, are marking my map with the locations of the falls and finds, the houses, deserts and fields, even the personal lives of eye witnesses and descendants. Rather than a reconstruction of the events, my work is a collection of traces, an investigation into the workings of time, memory and history and an attempt to create a link between the ordinary and the sublime.

Regine Petersen