
Afesdas (V) Holokautoma, 3:22 UTC
installation
2018
sculpture and video
Exhibited:
Święto wydziału, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, 2018;
Przekwit/Overbloom, Ogród Botaniczny UW, Warsaw, 2019;
Viral ART 2.0, ACKiM UMCS, Lublin, 2021.
Afesdas (V) Holokautoma, 3:22 UTC is an installation consisting of a sculpture, an archival photo of Vladimir Komarov's remains and a series of four films entitled Sermon to the birds, which are a film record of the action carried out in May and June 2018, consisting in the projection of recordings with the reading of the First Afesdas Manifesto in culturally depleted places.
Photos
Holokautoma, 3:22 UTC
2018
The theme taken up at work and contained in the title refers to the story of Vladimir Komarov. He was a Soviet astronaut, the only participant in the Soyuz 1 space mission, which, two years before the American Apollo 11 mission, was to be a milestone in the preparation for the moon landing program and the broadly understood 'conquest of space', which during the Cold War was one of the most symbolic and propagandistically exposed fields of the struggle between the US and the USSR. On April 23, 1967 at 00:35 UTC, Soyuz 1 was launched with Komarov on board. The flight lasted over a day, but a number of design flaws and failures prevented the mission from being completed as planned. After nearly 27 hours and eighteen orbits of the Earth, Komarov interrupted the mission and attempted to return. During landing, none of the parachutes opened, and the astronaut approached the ground without any control or braking ability. At the time of entering the atmosphere, Komarov in a 2.8-tonne lander was piercing the air at a speed exceeding 50 m/s. The listening stations in Turkey caught his screams of rage and despair as he headed for his inevitable death. The capsule hit the ground on April 24, 1967 (3:22 UTC), near the village of Karasuk in the Adamów Region, Orenburg Oblast. Holokautoma is a biblical term from Greek for a burnt offering - an offering made entirely to God by burning. Completely unconsciously and unintentionally, Afesdas V, while formally part of the series of sculptures initiated at the turn of 2016 and 2017, resembles extraterrestrial structures, and at the same time the charred remains of Komarov, whose history and drama can be symbolically treated as a parallel to the collective narrative that embraces people and fills life. societies. Apart from the rational aspect of our actions, he focuses on irrational desires, in this case defined by a race, the culmination and goal of which was to be a symbolic gesture of putting a foot on the moon, sticking a flag into a void surrounded by infinity. A project involving thousands of people and for the name of which many lost their lives.