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In scientific terms, space is an empty space beyond the Earth atmosphere, inaccessible to direct observation by most people. On the other hand, the modern human experience of the concept of space is close to what the ancients called “the sky” and which in their myths was often represented as a goddess covering the human part of the world. Because of this, the concept of “space” contains an intrinsic hiatus.
Humans desperately strive to understand the world as a whole and their place in it. Scientific knowledge does not inherently designate human place in space. At the same time, myth tries to comprehend this place and allow humans to be involved in cosmic processes. In the realm of myth, sacred objects and actions strive to bring cosmological knowledge into a form close to humans and literally surround them. The realm of myth allows humans to “be-in-space” in the literal sense, starting with the first shirt or blanket as the first “to be-in”.
The myth also works with the fundamental angst that comes from the most eternal question about the place of a small human being in the vast cosmos, an angst that modern existentialists call “abandonment in the world.” Humans without the embrace of a myth are beings without an answer to the question of their place; they are abandoned, just as the explorer of space is abandoned and alone.
Dark matter in science is something that surrounds us, but is unknown and inaccessible even to scientific observation. “Ordinary” matter, on the other hand, surrounds a person literally, starting with clothes — it is the closest “in” in which a person feels herself. Paradoxically, a modern person feels herself “in” clothes rather than “in” the space conceptualized by science.
The artistic installation creates a modern metamyth. It contains the concept of the peacefulness of the sky, understood as ancient space. The mythological idea of the connection of humans with the world thus gives rise to the idea of the sky as a placenta, which, however, is destroyed and is thrown out together with man into the existential void after “birth” — after going into space in the scientific sense. Despite this, the human-children in the installation still strive to be enveloped in at least something in the void of abandonment: they cover themselves with their myth as a cozy shell-skin, weaving it from a warm dark material, the mythological opposite of the unknown dark matter.
In this same matter, the human-children weave constellations — a concept that is on the verge of myth and science. Constellations are a mixture of the human-commensurable and the human-incommensurable. They create windows into worlds where humans feel ordered with the cosmos in the same way as the stars in the sky are ordered and calmly placed by humans themselves. The constellation is formed precisely in the ancient “sky”, on its covering film: to see and feel it, one does not need to go to the “scientific” space. Through the constellation, the space becomes close and cozy.
What awaits humans in their abandonment? Is it possible to reconcile the gap between the scientific space and the ancient “sky”? Where can humans find support in the endless cosmic emptiness? Or, in spite of everything, should they see in their abandonment-in-the-world and in their abandonment-in-space the great freedom? A terrible freedom to which every person is condemned, but which can be the only true freedom.
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“As Hamlet said, ‘To be or to not to be, that is the question.’ In a similar fashion, the world that we find exists, but at same time it is not sufficient unto itself, does not its own being, cries out about what it lacks, proclaims its non-being and obliges us to philosophize; for this is what philosophizing is — seeking to give the world its integrity, completing it as a Universe, and out of the part constructing for it a whole in which it can lodge and be at rest.”[1]
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“[…] all that there is, there in front of us, given to us, present and clear, is in its very essence a mere piece, a bit, a fragment, the stump of something absent. And we cannot see it without sensing and missing the part that is not there. In every given being, every datum of the world, we find its essential fracture line, its character as a part and only a part; we see the scar of its ontological mutilation; its ache of the amputated cries out at us, its nostalgia for the bit that is lacking, its divine discontent.”[2]
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[…] experimental science is only a meager portion of the mind and the organism. Where it stops, man does not stop. If the physicist stays the hand with which he delineates things at the point where his methods end, the human being who stands behind every physicist prolongs the line and carries it on to the end, just as our eye, seeing a portion of a broken arch, automatically completes the missing airy curve.[3]
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