Casco’s humble office in Utrecht which holds one fax machine, one part time employee, two interns and an email account is turned into a full fledged information center from which press releases are sent worldwide, reaching other press rooms, universities and amateur clubs. At this point in history, it is still clear that if a woman wants to land on the moon, she will have to build it for herself.ġ999, April: Production begins. Technological progress is clear, but how far have we really come as a society? First Woman on the Moon is conceived to effectively beat JFK to his words and put a woman on the moon “. The artist expresses and interest to work outdoors with the Dutch beaches which are known to her as manmade and contested territories 17% of the country’s land area is reclaimed from natural wetlands for agricultural use, while centuries of flood defense makes for a nation experienced in wrestling with nature.ġ999, March: Global media is filling up with reports in anticipation of the celebration of the 30 th anniversary of the original moon landing. His focus is on landscape representation rather than Cold War politics and his book even shows the unshaven and fatigued astronauts in a more human light.ġ999, February: Aleksandra Mir is invited by Lisette Smiths, Director of the non-profit organization Casco Projects to realize a public project in the Netherlands. Invited by NASA to revisit their archives 30 years on, he makes a personal selection and works with the new technology of digital scanning, which allows him to tell a very different official story than the one originally told. The space between reality and fiction remains a fertile ground for speculation.ġ999: San Francisco Photographer Mike Light releases the book Full Moon. The same clues are subsequently counter-proven by scientific expertise who point to the unique atmospheric conditions on the moon, but it does not seem to faze those already convinced of a conspiracy.
A whole genre of conspiracy theories that question the authenticity of the mission flourish, pointing to a series of clues in the still photography provided by NASA.
NASA holds over 30,000 still photographs taken with Hasselblad cameras from the Apollo missions, but initially only a small fraction depicting the heroism of the missions, are released in public.ġ997: The Movie Capricorn One is released with a story line that renders the moon landing a fake shot in a Hollywood film studio. For the rest of mankind, the landings become but a mediated reality, received through photography and television. We Came in Peace for All Mankind’ġ969 - 1972: Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 each land two astronauts on the surface. The American flag is deployed and a plaque is unveiled with the inscription: ‘Here Men From Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon. Spacecraft commander Neil Armstrong and astronaut Buzz Aldrin spend two hours on the lunar surface setting up observation equipment and collecting rock samples. to achieving the goal before the decade is out, of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth!’ This will take billions of dollars and the invention of a new space rocketġ969, July 20: The Apollo 11 crew makes the first human landing on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility. Defeated by the Russians in the space race by only three weeks, President Kennedy gives a spirited speech before Congress where he dedicates the resources of this nation “.
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to travel in space, utters the soon to be world famous words, “The Earth is Blue.”ġ961, May 5: The US launches a Mercury spacecraft, carrying astronaut Alan Shepard. The same evening, while the party still went on, the landscape was flattened out again, leaving no physical trace of the event behind - save the memories and a story to tell future generationsįirst Woman on the Moon, Produced by Casco Projects, Utrechtġ633, June: Galileo Galilei, the Father of Modern Science, is charged with heresy and sentenced to life-long house arrest for the Copernican view that the Earth is not the centre of the universe but moves around the sun.ġ961, April 12: The Soviet Union launches the first manned space vehicle, Vostok 1, which completes a single orbit of the Earth.
At sunset the labor stopped, and a live drumbeat announced the ceremony of a woman, gracing this imaginary moon with an American flag.
The day when heavy machinery and manpower transformed a Dutch beach into a lunar landscape of hills and craters.