A MESSAGE FROM SPACE IN MY BACKYARD

"It is far from rational from the perspective of single human life to imagine that a piece of space shuttle, after being launched some 20 years ago, would hit a woman in her backyard in California, or a piece of derelict Russian satellite, after orbiting the earth for a several decades, would reach its final destination in the desert of Australia in front of local shepherds."
Krassimir Terziev

Krassimir Terziev’s ’A Message from Space in my Backyard’ documents several cases of space debris coming back to earth. These cases become a series of dissonant counterpoints to one of the strongest embodiments of a belief in enlightenment: man’s ability to conquer space. Focussed on the debris left behind by one of the scientific and political highlights of progress in modernity, the film embodies the enduring need for intellectual interpretation and cultural imagination when one watches phenomena like these from the perspective of individual human life. For instance, the film refers to the meaning of the word ’heaven’ in secular modernity, the loss of any relation between form and function, and, finally, the magic character of all these accidents. There are two versions of this film, one of them being a single channel version with a voice-over, and the other one a two channel video installation, where the story is being told by running texts appearing on one of the screens.