by aina tasso

As I said in the notes section of Image 1, the pit shows many of God’s creations coming out. What I wanted to show with this collage was the end of civilizations as we started making more scientific discoveries and disconnecting from language, the Earth, and ourselves. Sputnik is one of the greatest scientific inventions because it was the first time we got something man-made out of this planet. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition states that the reaction to being able to get something into space was, 
“relief about the first ‘step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.’ And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk for one of Russia’s great scientists: ‘Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever’” (Arendt, 1). 
In this collage, Sputnik is carrying out three symbols of ancient civilizations. The tumi by Chimú, which comes from the Incas, was a ceremonial knife that symbolized high rank and authority in ancient Peruvian society. The tumi is believed to show Naymlap, a legendary figure in Peru’s history. The Coin Depicting the God Zeus also shows another legendary figure. In Greek mythology, Zeus is the god of the sky and is considered the ruler. With this part of the collage, we see two godly figures in the same painting. The cauldron comes from the Western Zhou Dynasty and was used for ceremonies. The cauldron depicts the story of an honorable captain and the legs display images of animals. This particular cauldron also marks a transition point in the designs of early Chinese bronzes. I thought that this transition point connection would be fitting to put into conversation with the images of Sputnik and the half-human half-robot hybrid picture on the last leg of Sputnink. When put into the bigger Bosch painting, Sputnik would be lifting all of this out of the pit. In Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, we follow the story of a person trying to find her language and community, of her connection with other people in this world. What do we lose when we make our connection with the Earth weaker? When we see space as our escape, is that the sign that we should give up trying to save this Earth? The only place that can support our life form and the ground from which we were created.