Installation, Video, 14 min
This installation by Bertrand Dezoteux, winner of the 2015 Audi Talent Awards, is based on a real event. In 2010-11, six men, who will never be astronauts, spent 520 days in a Russian warehouse, in a space cap- sule spoofing old-fashioned Soviet aesthetics. They shot video footage and measured changes in their psychology and immune systems. At the end of 250 days, the mission reached Mars (actually, a sandbox in a tent). Only three crew members were allowed to fill their thermoses with Martian soil, while the other three waited in the ship. Then they "went home." For almost a year and a half the six made official speeches with no real audience, Skypeing with their families as if they were in space, working by day and, at night, engaging in "creative leisure activities." Dezoteux's two core notions here were "creative," a word artists don't like to have applied to them, and "leisure," the kind that make a bad impression, of course. A champion of 3D animated Spinozan folds and surfing, he rummaged around in hobby shops to find what he needed to reproduce the real Mars 500 mission in a cardboard carton inhabited by puppets recalling Bellmer dolls as well as the old British TV show Thunderbirds. Thus pretense was piled on top of pretense in a tongue in cheek fiction about people trapped in a real fiction. • Éric Loret, Artpress