AFRONAUTS
EPFC | December 7th, 2015
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
Guest curator: CHRISTOPHER HARRIS
The title for the series of films I’ve selected for the month of December is DOWN TO EARTH: EXTRATERRISTRIALS AND HEAVENLY BODIES. I will be posting films and videos about space travel and visitors who are not of this world. Last week the EPFC introduced me as the guest curator with a post of my film 28.IV.81 (Descending Figures), a film based on a performance about a humanoid being that is not of this world. As such, it makes a fitting, if perhaps unexpected, prelude to the series.
The next video in the series is Afronauts a retro-futurist vision of earth bound space travel by Christina De Middel.From De Middel’s Vimeo page:In 1964, still living the dream of their recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon catching up with the USA and the Soviet Union in the space race.
Only a few optimists supported the project by Edward Makuka, the school teacher in charge of presenting the ambitious program and getting its necessary funding. But the financial aid never came, as the United Nations declined their support, and one of the astronauts, a 16 year-old girl, got pregnant and had to quit.
…
As a photojournalist I have always been attracted by the eccentric lines of story-telling avoiding the same old subjects told in the same old ways.
Now, with my personal projects, I respect the basis of the truth but allow myself to break the rules of veracity trying to push the audience into analyzing the patterns of the stories we consume as real.
“Afronauts” is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in the pictures. I started from a real fact that took place 50 years ago and rebuilt the documents adapting them to my personal imagery.