Moon Landing, 2024
Wood, chalk paint
140 χ 118 χ 15 cm
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#spaceage #sculpture #rocket #puppetry #toy #moonlanding #moon# frame #monitor #TV #scene #stage #vagabondsculptures #kostisvelonis #athensconservatoire
The Moon is no longer sky, it is screen, stage
The sculptural installation Moon Landing inscribes itself within a regime of image and memory defined by the so-called Space Age: the period stretching from the launch of Sputnik to the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon.
The black surface with the central opening functions as a frame, recalling the bulky television screens of the 1960s that broadcast Armstrong’s “small step” on a global scale. The white form housed within the opening remains ambiguous: rocket, dwelling, puppet, or children’s toy. This ambiguity connects the work with puppetry and the theatricality of the model; the Moon here does not appear as the distant Other, but as a miniature stage inhabited by the handmade and the playful.
As a construction, it seeks to render a meta-representation of spectacle and to function as a commentary on how the televised image transformed the Moon into a desire incorporated into everyday life. Beyond a technological event, the “flight” is enriched as a scenic installation, reminding us that the utopia of space is at once a playful puppet theatre and a mass television event.
The starting point of Moon Landing concerns the utopia of outer space, which unfolds within systems of children’s design. The intensive use of design accelerated the collapse of distinctions between children’s imagination and adult projections, while at the same time contributing to the displacement of collective imagination: the Moon, once a mythological mirror of human desire, was transformed into the backdrop of a televisual experience.
Here, the Moon is not sky, but screen. And space is not only a site of physical expansion, but a realm where imagination, technology, and spectacle are entangled in a shared, ambivalent utopia.
