a3 - Ars Ad Astra A Cosmonaut's Comments

The First Art Exhibition in Earth Orbit

Link-up with the Mir space station
Euromir crew
Live transmission from Mir station to Transinne Belgium
A Cosmonaut's Comments

The following exchange took place on November 30, 1995 at the EuroSpace Center in Transinne, Belgium during a live link-up with the Mir space station. The speakers on Earth are ESA Public Relations employee Daria Robinson and ESA astronaut Elf Merbold , and ESA cosmoanaut Thomas Reiter on the Mir space station. During the link-up the cosmonaut crew announced the winning artwork - the crew's favourite - which was to stay on the Mir station:

Daria Robinson:
"Mir, can you hear us, this is Belgium. Thomas, can you hear us? Hello Thomas, provedjen ... We have here a very large crowd of people. First we want you to show us a little art in space and tell us what is your favourite."

Thomas Reiter:
"O.K. Daria. Thank you for the introduction. I hope you can see all the 20 drawings fastened together on a wall which hopefully gives some contrast and a point of view to the different pictures...

exhibition on mir

It was quite a difficult task for us to select a favourite picture out of these because we liked them all. We took the task very serious, in fact it took us more than a week. One evening we took 10 out of the 20, on the next evening we dropped three of the ten so seven were left.

"You can see on the other row the three pictures. The winner is this picture from Ms Caroll Smith.."When Dreams are Born" ..... The last seven pictures we choose the second place is the picture from Mark Maxwell, called "Promise". It was very difficult, it took a long discussion and the next evening we had a look again and confirmed it. The third place is a picture called "Unforgettable Home" from Alessandro Bartolozzi and they were quite close the second and the third place and we like to thank all the artists.........

".....and let me tell you that there are many things here on board which keep us alive, of course technical systems which produce oxygen to breathe, water to drink which clean the air from carbon dioxide, food and all these things which help to keep us alive, life support systems. But I can tell you that this kind of thing (he holds up a picture) are a part of what is necessary to keep us alive, to keep the memory to the Earth, to our families, to our friends, to the nature.

So we thank you all very much for these beautiful pictures, and for those who have not been selected ....... we can assure you that we like all of your pictures. Maybe it was a little unfair to force us to do a selection, so, thank you very much."

Click here to view a QuickTime video of the announcement.

An Art-In-Space Project Organized by the OURS Foundation