Cosmovisión

Cosmovisión

In 1977, NASA launched two space probes transporting two phonograph records dubbed the “Golden Record”, containing, in coded form, documents destined for a potential extraterrestrial intelligence. Including around a hundred photographs as well as music, sounds, and speech from our planet, these documents are intended to describe as exhaustively as possible human life on Earth and, in particular, human civilization.

"Cosmovisión" imagines a possible follow-up to this gesture of throwing a bottle into the interstellar ocean. The video displays extraterrestrial life arriving on Earth, come to meet its residents, exclusively guided by the Golden Record’s vision.

As the celestial bodies slowly take on human form, with first uncertain movements finding assurance, a kind of reconnaissance mission begins, surveying a strange, unknown landscape. Their perplexed eyes scan a vast observatory lost in the middle of the mountains, a rundown and deserted space. The “meeting” that was supposed to take place now seems impossible, as well as any understanding of the events leading up to it. The buildings, facilities, and devices they discover – traces of intense human activity and signs of an attempt to surpass Earthen bounds – are nonetheless incomprehensible to the beings, offering no clue except for the disarming, enigmatic idea that the world might have been founded in its own image.

This project is from Mondes Nouveaux, Ministry of Culture.

ARTIST: Garush Melkonyan

Born 1993 in Abovyan, Armenia.

Lives and works in Paris, France

Garush Melkonyan is a visual artist who works with moving images, installations, and sculptures. His work has been presented in exhibitions, screenings, and festivals, in venues such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; the Nordenhake Gallery and Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City; La Panacée, Montpellier; Jean Claude Maier, Frankfurt and Lasecu, Lille. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 and Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. His diploma project, “The Interview,” was awarded the Thaddaeus Ropac Prize.