A Stone of Mars was an installation anotherform in collaboration with Marina Abramovic for her exhibition Traces. The installation was a response to her stone from Mars and a work of hers in which she every star in the galaxy aloud. The installation was made from a recording of this work, a bed of sand, mirrored spheres and orange lights.

When I was a child, I would watch the sun go down through my bedroom window and imagine that those dust particles caught in the last rays of sunshine were little spaceships from another galaxy. We were surrounded by visitors, I thought, and didn’t even realize it. I was always thinking this way: Who are we? Where are we going? Where do we come from? I often visualized a big cosmic lady kicking us around on our little blue Earth. In this vision, I felt we had no choices, no willpower, no ability to change. We had one clear destiny, at the mercy of this cosmic lady.

I thought about all of this again on my birthday a few years ago, when my friend, Paula Garcia – an artist and one of the creators of my institute – gave me a completely mind-blowing present. It was a stone from Mars, with an official certificate. I couldn’t believe it. This stone traveled all the way to Earth and now I had the luxury to connect to another planet in our solar system through it.

This little stone from Mars reminded me that we don’t truly understand the mechanics of our universe. We are always busy with the small picture rather than the big picture. Our thoughts are almost always centered around ourselves. But we have to get out of that. We have to have a big picture about the world. If the flight of a single bird can influence the wind in Madagascar, how can we say we truly understand the cause and effects of our lives on this planet? If we envision our personal lives as a little dot on a small blue planet, we will live differently.