2007 HOME

Exhibition: “Space Era”
The A.S. Popov Central Museum of Communications
26.10-1.12.2007
www.rustelecom-museum.ru

Ludmila Belova
“Home” DVD 5.28 min., 2007


The film is inspired by the stories and diaries of the astronauts that have spent a long time on the orbital stations and have done spacewalk.

Observing Earth, you often think about it. You often recall your own life on the Earth, smells of grass and forest, birds singing.
Man in space keenly feels the lack of earthly connections and often recalls them. A good book is needed in space that would narrate about life on the Earth, about people, their relationships, about Earth nature. In rare free moments one wants to read earthly books and see earthly pictures. On the board of our “Soyuz-9”we had several color photos of the Baikal picturesque scenery. I recall with what delight we were looking through them on the 10th day of our space mission.
…Yes! I already miss the Earth and people, my close and dear friends!
A week ago, as I have written, I dreamt of a rain. Just an ordinary rain.
But I heard its noise in my dream. And this noise followed me everywhere. Seeing a powerful cyclone over Africa I imagined how it was raining there: a tropical rain, a thunderstorm. No, this was not what I wanted, but our soft, warm and tender summer rain!
Yesterday I saw a sparrow in my dream. Just an ordinary sparrow.
He was sitting on the dusty road, looking for something to eat. I passed by carefully not to put him up, and he was glancing at me, skipping and turning and saw me off doing his business. Then started and flew away…I even sighed in my dream. Today I caught myself at the thought that it was long time since I heard the sound of footsteps. We don’t walk here, we swim. Sometimes when we are busy, we pass each other so quietly that we cannot hear each other moving, we can only see it.
Yes, we swim over the floor, on which no one has stepped or ever will. But still- this is a floor. Just a mere convention. One of a thousand conventions that man is accustomed to.
…Once we woke up with my friend and partner on the 18 days space mission, the captain of the “Soyuz 9” spaceship, Andrian Nikolayev and looked at each other: “How it would be nice to go to the forest right now. Barefoot on the grass. Just for two minutes”. – “Do you recall the smell of fresh cucumber?”
 

Extract from the diary of Vitaly Sevastianov, a space pilot.

 

After clearing signal at 11 p.m. we are left to ourselves and so we read and watch films from our ample video library…
 

From the interview with Alexander Serebrov, a space pilot.