Space artisans
Luis Imperiale sent us a brief email at the begining of the summer in which he introduced himself (after becoming a producer) and informed us that 'he had bought us a book'. The surprise, big in itself, turned huge when we received it: a carefully crafted hard cover with golden letters (Kosmos) and a considerable size added an old time mystery to the present, as they did to the gesture.
'[About NASA scientists] Even after landing on the Moon, I can't remember a single high-handed declaration. I think they always observed us with the respectful distance with which you gaze at an artisan who keeps his technique a secret.'(picture: Energomash workers supervise the pieces of a rocket engine)
Kosmos is a fascinating book, filled with images of a strange beauty which deepen into cosmonautics as 'a world of its own', at the other side of the Near East doors ('vostok'); from which noone without authorizations went in or out, and where people dealt with secrets which they were forbidden to tell to their close relatives. A world which generated hundreds of 'black jobs', as Svetlana Boym calls them: a mass of scientists, soldiers and artisans which were never able to tell anyone what they did for a living, for fear of the government to see this bizarre reality -a mixture of technology, craft and military order- exposed to the spotlight.
In the days in which we need to go back to the images of the true cosmonautic reality, the days in which Gagarin's mother found out on the radio that her son had been sent to Space (and she could only say 'my little one, my little one... where has he gone to this time?') and the days in which for each name entering the annals, fifty previous names had been erased... We will always go back to this wonderful Kosmos and its inspiring pages.
Gestures like these are what make keep going make sense.
Thank you, Luis.
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