«BAIKONUR-2» by Sergey Maslov

Sergey Maslov is one of the pioneers of contemporary art in Kazakhstan. He was born in 1952 in Samara, lived and worked in Almaty. In his artistic practice, Maslov developed speculative mythology using various media - installation, video, performance, and painting. Maslov had a great influence on the artistic environment of the 90s and unexpectedly passed away in 2002. One of the unfinished projects during his lifetime - the installation Baikonur-2, was created according to the artist's sketches, part of this work is a futuristic story about space nomads and digital photo collages. Especially for IADA readers, we prepared an English translation of the original text.

BAIKONUR 2

Installation, computer collage, sound projection, text Kazakhs are the purest and most direct descendants of aliens who flew from Sirius and populated the earth 2000 years ago and, with the help of genetic engineering, created people from monkeys. The history of Earth civilizations is heavily distorted by European monks who, in order to give more authority to Christianity, exaggerated world history several times. Aliens had their own colony on the continent of Mu. When a large meteorite began to approach the Earth, leading to a planetary catastrophe, which resulted in the destruction of the continents of Mu, Atlantis, and many mammals, amphibians,

Kazakhs temporarily moved to the moon. Harsh living conditions on the moon and civil strife between starship teams entailed the degradation of the space nomad’s civilization.

Wanting to preserve the main achievements of science, several crews returned to the Earth and took refuge in the least habitable areas. As their most valuable possession, they considered spaceships that could return their descendants to the homeland. To avoid being discovered, the descendants of the crew members constantly changed the location of star machines. In the 30s of the twentieth century, missiles were discovered by the USSR Internal Affairs Commissariat agents and confiscated for scientific analysis. In the image of the captured missiles, in 1959 USSR created simplified spaceships, which managed to enter open space. Taking advantage of the plight of Soviet scientists, the CIA agents (USA) stole the secrets of new aircraft and in a short time built similar models.

Space alien analysts did not rule out the possibility of starships being captured or destroyed, therefore they developed yurt - a dwelling for their race in the form of space rockets, which can be innovated at any time to reproduce the advanced aircraft. In the 60s, the idea of aliens was unraveled by the German anthropologist von Däniken and presented to the world through a full-length documentary film "Memories of the Future". Aliens in the USSR lobbied to ban the screening of the film. With this project I make a second attempt to tell everyone the true story about the last decades of the Lunar life of Kazakhs.

Sergey Maslov, 2002