2016

«What is happening? Here, above us, there is a man twenty meters above the earth, imprisoned in a wooden box, and pitting his strength against an invisible danger, which he has taken on his own free will. But we are standing below, thrust right back out of the way, without existence, and looking at this man.» Franz Kafka, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, 1947

On March 12, 1908, took place the first public flight in the Western Hemisphere of a heavier-than-air machine. The craft took off from the frozen surface of Keuka Lake, USA, and remained aloft for 20 seconds, before it went down on one wing and crashed. From this decisive historical fact I drew up a fictional character, telling an abstract story, which combines strange experiments and discoveries. It is a utopian tale of seemingly unattainable dreams, which alludes to a place of hope and togetherness in a common effort to transcend natural frontiers, to the moon and back. Examining visual and written archives; building useless tools and an escape vehicle bound to crash, as a metaphor for happy failure; mixing replicas and artifacts with scientific records to confound their veracity whilst embodying the wildest of ideas, Do you really believe they put a man on the moon? questions the construction of knowledge and the interpretation of history seen through a specific prism. Borrowing devices that enhance our perception of the world it aims to open our eyes to the possibility of utopia and dreams.