A Message from Space in my Backyard

1957. Sputnik 1 was launched. This top secret satellite carried a life-sized “mannequin cosmonaut” – an ancestor to cosmonaut Ivan Ivanovich. Unfortunately, the flight of Sputnik 1 was doomed. A major malfunction caused the capsule to become incorrectly oriented... it drifted into space, trapped in its unwanted orbit until reentry.

Space debris: man-made material orbiting the earth that has outlived its useful lifetime: satellites that have become inactive; discarded rocket bodies; pieces of material jettisoned or having flaked off spacecraft; small objects that are the results of collisions or explosions.

A Message from space in my Backyard is a two channel video installation that focuses on the phenomenon of space debris. In the format of а photo-video essay, one channel follows the short history of man in space and the chronology of space junk objects reentering Earth orbit and falling back on the ground at unpredictable moments and places. The facts in the story are layered with excerpts from the brothers Strugatsky science ction short novelRoadside Picnic and other interpretations of the phenomenon. The other channel visualises an imaginary body, half-natural, half-technological, that drifts in space with zero gravity.