Eden Eternal 2023

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Gracia Bradshaw

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Aug 3, 2024, 11:11:08 AM8/3/24

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The time has come: the EDEN ISS laboratory in the Antarctic has been set up, the first seedlings have been placed in the growth cabinets, and after eight weeks, the majority of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fr Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) team has returned to Germany. For DLR scientist Paul Zabel the only member of the EDEN ISS team to remain in the Antarctic until the end of 2018, this means that his winter deployment on the Neumayer III station operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) has begun. Cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers will be the first home-grown crops at the world's southernmost tip. "Our aim is that there will always be something to harvest over the coming months," says DLR Project Manager, Daniel Schubert. After all, the harvest is intended to replenish the diet of the 10-person winter crew.

By the evening, explains Schubert, you were already exhausted. The DLR researchers had to get used to working in the laboratory, the extremely dry and icy Antarctic air, living in a confined space on the station with a total of 50 scientists and station crew and the four-bed rooms with shared bathrooms in the corridor. At this time of year, the Sun barely rises above the horizon before disappearing again an hour later at sunset. "You lose all sense of time and only know what day it is by what there is for lunch," says Schubert. "On Friday there is fish and Monday is pizza day." The scientists were also repeatedly visited by penguins curiously approaching the container and observing their work.

The EDEN ISS project will be conducted during an overwintering mission at the German Antarctic station Neumayer III, in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). A large number of other international partners are contributing to a research consortium under the auspices of DLR, ensuring that the greenhouse will work smoothly in the Antarctic: Wageningen University and Research (Netherlands), Airbus Defence and Space (Germany), LIQUIFER (Austria), the National Research Council (Italy), the University of Guelph (Canada), Enginsoft (Italy), Thales Alenia Space (Italy), Arescosmo (Italy), Heliospectra (Sweden), the Limerick Institute of Technology (Ireland), Telespazio (Italy), and the University of Florida (USA) all form part of the consortium of the EDEN ISS project. The project is financed with funds from the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under project number 636501.

This essay focuses on a critical analysis of the reality television program The Real Housewives, using the biblical story of Eve to illuminate the ways in which myths of femininity are perpetuated and reimagined within popular culture. Bridging reality television scholarship with post biblical scholarship surrounding the figure of Eve, this essay seeks to approach how both mythology and spectacle intertwine within the mass consumed genre of reality television to reiterate and recreate notions of the eternal feminine in ways that disarm and disengage audiences' critical thinking and response to these representations. By focusing on conspicuous consumption and bodily alteration and adornment within The Real Housewives, this essay provides insight into how this show presents femininity as a continuous cycle of reaching for perfection and perpetually falling short due to the myth of inherently flawed femininity, which begins with Eve's story and can be carried forward to her modern counterpart, the real housewife.

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