Talking to Ewen Chardronnet: poetics of the encounter
February 17th, 2010
On December 4th 2009 I recorded an interview with Ewen Chardronnet. I’d heard that he’d been to space places in Russia.
I want to interview people, artists who I think have pioneered, have gone into space agencies as sort of the first artists. I want to find out what their impressions are because I have a hunch we all get affected more or less by the same set of things.
He’d been part of the artists Zero-G flights in 2003. He traveled from Paris to Moscow and then Star City is not far. There were a group of them. A European grant and various partners - The Arts Catalyst, Project Atol maybe and the artists had given in proposals and the group had come from that. His was about drug-taking in space. He was interested in thse altered states of mind and then that the astronauts had taken scopolamine, a hallucinogenic, and amphetamines to cure the sickness, but lines and reasons are interestingly blurred. The proposal hadn’t gone down well with the Russians. but he was there anyway, on some other premise.
I asked him to tell me the story starting from his home so I could relive the narrative. It turned out that this narrative had also been what he became interested in. He made a film about the procedure. He wanted to show the tensions in the process. Today I watched it for the first time. I wish I could put the video here, but here is the link to the Association of Autonomous Astronauts video blog.
There was a week of training and then the zero G flights where the plane goes up and down following parabolas that give about twenty seconds of no gravity at the top and bottom of the curve.
It wasn’t so unusual to have a group of artists there because the Russians had for some time been dealing commercially with film crews etc. and Ewen said that also, they were able to switch between the technical and metaphysical realms. All the same the procedure was military.
“They do it as so-called commercial, but they are quite willing, they are interested in the artist’s crazy ideas and they really make a fuss so it is possible. Its not like, ‘oh no this is science and you are crazy’, no no they are really like arts in a way. Cosmonauts are, the Russians they have this different approach I think from Europeans. They are more sensible to lets say metaphysics or if you look at the nineteenth century the Russians were the first to write essays and astrological treaties, also metaphysics about space travel. So they were the first people to take this seriously in a way. So they have this tradition of Cosmos and Cosmonauts. So they are quite sensitive. There are also many Russian Cosmonauts…who make paintings and have a sensitivity to arts, maybe more than engineers and rocket pilots from Europe.”
People would say “Niet, niet” to any request, but then it would be maybe and then it would happen. So the film was about these things, the tensions and briefings. Its not that easy, people get sick, the military people are screaming…
He’d gone to Russia at the time I’d started to get interested in satellites. I told him about my experience of going to space places and how it felt to be an artist in that situation. That you are taken seriously and treated in a demeaning way, there is interest and put downs and its hard to go through.
He said that after the flight he felt very lonely. The experience was intense and there were big parties afterwards. Everyone was on a high - people are comparing the Zero-G to different drug taking. It makes you feel ecstatic. Everyone drank a lot and talked and clubbed. But coming back to Paris, it was hard to share the experience. When you start to talk about it, you are stressed. Then you find that you cannot make people understand what you are feeling. There is something around explaining this centre of gravity, this new experience of where your centre is that is too ineffable for words.
He said you get feedbacks too: the G-force feeling in the metro brings you a memory and you feel you might take off again.
He talked about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts that started in the ’90’s from a collection of people interested in mail art, having no money…they were interested in looking at space as metaphors, such as ‘gravity of life’. They were a fake activist group against the monopoly on space exploration challenging why working class people couldn’t go into space. He was interested in space in literature, in Proust, Klebnikov?, Cerano de Bergerac. At that time they weren’t trying to make actual connections with the space agencies, that came later. Zivadinov and Marco Pelihan, Slovinian art group NSK - they were doing abstract theatre in ‘99 about zero gravity.
I asked is it relevant to go to the real space bases to explore the metaphor? He said exploring the metaphor is more about exploring earth, life on earth. You can say of a child they are always on the moon, come down…all this language is used.
I asked about how being there might change things inside the culture of the space community.
Ewen said “I felt it was a big achievement that the Russian Cosmonauts heard about the Autonomous Astronauts” and we talked about these encounters that happen through the project of the work of artists. The artwork gives you the premise, but the real work is in the poetics of the encounter.
