I’d say this is rather brilliant. “In 1964, a Zambian grade-school science teacher single-handedly, and unilaterally, created a space program for his country. The program involved rolling aspiring astronauts down a hill in a barrel and clipping their rope-swings at the height of their arc to simulate weightlessness. He claimed his country would not only beat both the Americans and Russians to the moon, but do it within the year.
Today, Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel‘s photo project, Afronauts, creates a fictional documentation of these efforts. The result is a fact-bending, visually striking fantasy that includes elephant-hugging astronauts, patterned space junk, weightless cats and an engineer day-dreaming at a rusted control panel.
“My intention is to drive the audience into reflection on what they consume as real,” says De Middel. “In the beginning most people believed everything [in the photos] was real. People asked if I had been in Zambia in the ’60s. They trusted the image but not me, which is quite funny.”
The forgotten Zambian space program was the brainchild of Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a science teacher who dared to dream big. Following independence for the central African nation in 1964, Makuka Nkoloso founded the National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, Zambia’s first (and completely unofficial) space academy. [...]”
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