Dimensions variable up to 12m (13yrds) across
On Feburary 22, 2021, NASA released footage from its parachute-up-look camera aboard the Perseverance rover during its descent towards the Martian surface days before. Within hours, internet users discovered an Easter egg encoded into the parachute itself. The binary red and white stripes read "DARE MIGHTY THINGS," thereby eliciting a cultural touch-point ripe for internet virality driving both public engagement and support for the rover mission.
TEND YOUR GARDEN identifies this cultural touch-point as a significant symbolic action designed to manage the optics of space exploration, and offers a counter-gesture. Its title and message are drawn from the ending of Voltaire's Candide. How the garden is defined, and how it is meant to be tended, is deliberately left ambiguous.