Soren Thilo Funder

In 1961 the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stopped the bus transporting him from Star City to the launch platform of Vostok 1, exited the vehicle and urinated against one of the tires. Since he could not do his business inside the rocket this was the only option to ‘go’ before launch. Ever since this incident, no cosmonaut has traveled out in space, without uri­nating up against the transportation bus for good luck. In The Cosmonaut (I don’t see any God up here), this ritual is revis­ited by an aging Yuri Gagarin who performs his own ritual, despite his death in 1968. The Cosmonaut (I don’t see any God up here) presents a historical reenactment, of this ritual­ization of the ordinary citizen into sacred and extraordinary, strangely warped by passed time. The iconic, propagandistic and utopian era of the cosmonaut is a transpired futuristic vision - a past future. It is the collective memory of passed expectations that is reformulated in The Cosmonaut (I don’t see any God up here).