spacewalk
2013
HD video 16:9, single channel, stereo, 3.31 min.
The video “spacewalk” explores linkages between space, gravity, and the human body. A cosmonaut glides down into what seems to be an industrial ambience. The sudden appearance of the globe of the Earth through a porthole dislocates the cosmonaut’s environment and interrogates the relationship between real-world and fabricated reality. The cosmonaut’s meta-voice reflects fundamental thoughts about the relationship between space, time, and movement in a text is based on Isaac Newton’s manuscript De Gravitatione from the seventeenth century. The work draws on a cosmonaut training session taken by Michael Najjar in December 2012 at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. The artist himself, locked in his heavy Orlan-M spacesuit, is performing the “spacewalk” in the hydrolab, a deep tank filled with five million liters of water.
The video was realized in collaboration with Thomas Rusch and Dieter Jaufmann.
