When a Spaceport Comes to Town

Katja Verheul received a grant for the development of a new film. When a Spaceport Comes to Town follows the local resistance against the construction of a military spaceport on the Scottish island of North Uist. While tech billionaires launch thousands of satellites, this remote natural landscape becomes the stage for a global story of space militarisation. Through poetic night imagery in which an islander “communicates” with satellites using light signals, the artistic video work combines time-lapse footage, staged scenes, and documentary recordings into a layered narrative about contemporary conflict and the pressing question: who does space actually belong to?

Katja is a Rotterdam-based filmmaker and artistic archaeologist who uses her films to make complex (and often invisible) social, political, and economic issues visible. After graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Goldsmiths University, she developed a practice as an artistic archaeologist, digging through our most recent histories with the central question: what remains after a war, and what is its impact on people and nature? Her work, grounded in long-term, in-depth research, seeks to render mediated and already historicised realities personal again, before they turn nostalgic or are forgotten. Verheul has been a resident at institutions including the Jan van Eyck Academie and Film Forward, and has presented her films at festivals such as IFFR and Visions du Réel, in institutions like Eye Filmmuseum and MAXXI Museum, and on Dutch television.