This thesis departs from the notion of extremeness understood as a property of a relation rather than of a place: an environment becomes extreme only in relation to a system meant to sustain life within it. From this definition, and from an understanding of the world as a network of metabolic labour, follows the thesis that extreme environments disclose habitability as work, since wherever the network of life thins out or is absent altogether, every condition of dwelling appears as something that must be produced and then continuously maintained. The theoretical part tests the same conceptual apparatus first in outer space, where life support systems are treated as a materialisation of the relation between body and environment, and then on Earth in the Anthropocene, where the body emerges as a community, the bodily boundary as a threshold, and instruments of observation as participants in what they describe. The artistic part transposes these relations into the cycle Extraterrestrial Units, in which devices establish and maintain, for a limited time, the ties between my body and soil, plants and the microbial community. Care appears there as measurable work and as control alike, and the thesis therefore offers no univocal answers but dwells on the tension between them.
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