The exhibition deals with the soviet romantic vision of the outer space in current Russia. The exhibition contains 20 pictures (size: 841 X 1189), a collection of objects and two music videos.

COSMONAUT OR ASTRONAUT?

Forgetting about politics and observing more closely the topic through "the eyes of a child", the cosmonauts were actually fascinating. The word cosmonaut itself is more mysterious than astronaut. Astronauts have a Yankee smile and a questionable shiny white dental plate.

As a child it was easier to identify myself with the comic like cosmonauts. I was interested on the visual effect of the conquest of space. Rockets, spacesuits and of course the heroes that flew in to the space with the rockets. There wasn’t any computer or video games in the seventies; a toy was the result of one's own fantasy.

Juri Gagarin was my hero. I still remember how I contrived the most different space rockets. The most massive was the two-sitter rocket. The utensils were quite simple: carton boxes and for the propulsion motor a loud hoover whose design reminded the soviet rockets of the seventies. Day after day I collected the carton box rockets in the living room and on Sundays was my trip to the cosmos. Through the imagination of a child, an ordinary living room changed into the moon's surface: I just needed to switch the lights off and everything was ready to start my walk on the moon with my torch.

Pictures for the media:

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© Sami Parkkinen
Tapionkatu 9
80200 Joensuu
tel / +358 50 379 3579
e-mail: sami.parkkinen@rajaproduction.fi