Page 30 - FANTASTIC COSMOS SHOW CATALOGUE

The impulse beyond the stereotype, of the microscopic (the spores in
the discussion of reality itself, pas- the woods) coexist in a story in whi-
ses through matter and its opposite; ch we are perpetually suspended,
through the urban - understood as where the judgment on modernity,
the regulation of social groups - and society and its forms is continually
its opposite. A vision where “good and questioned and problematized: the
bad”, which are “human categories” 4 space that surrounds us extends and
no longer exist, or at least are open takes on new meanings only it dia-
to discussion of their simplified divi- logues with the Cosmos. So, return
sions. The same discussion that Vasiliy to Lefebvre and his idea of “utopia”,
Sumin also carries out in the installa- present in the incredibly high and
tion Station YE5, a scientist highlights distant, but also in the deep, in the
the elements of continuity between underground.
the extreme Russian suburbs, the de-
velopment of terrestrial life forms
and the continuous evolution of the
cosmos. The fondamental elements of
the landscape of Nizhny Arkhyz - the
village in the Caucasus where Sumin’s
video was filmed - are two giant tele-
scopes, the largest ever made in mo-
dern times and holders of the record
until 1993. Around these two symbo-
lic elements a community of scienti-
sts was built, in close contact with
the dissidents who were looking for
a space for their independence in the
remote area .
5
The village of Nizhny Arkhyz becomes
the pretext to rethink the social cate-
gories of modern and contemporary
Russia, its communication and social
devices. The words of the scientist -
protagonist of the video - are mar-
ried with the hypothetical dialogue
between the two telescopes and the
stars, the infinite time of the Cosmos
speaks to us of the cyclic time of na-
ture, the rhythms and the rules of so-
cial life are subjected to the scrutiny 4 Statement made by the main
of their opposite: silence, solitude, character of YE5 by Vasiliy Sumin
observation. All voted to the altar of 5 «Many hiding ‘dissidenting’ people
an energy that is no more the one un- used to come here in the Soviet Union.
derstood and known on the earth, but This really tell us that the place is good»
an obscure energy that, undisturbed, says the scientist of Station YE5.
continues to act in the expansion of
the cosmos. The vision of the big (the
two telescopes), of the indefinitely
big (the cosmos heard by the telesco-
pes), of the small (the individual) and

25 i b