in orbit – An Astronaut in the Net
In May, when Alexander Gerst flies to the international space station ISS, he will become the eleventh German astronaut to conduct research in orbit, admiring our blue planet from a tremendous height. The Mönchengladbach native Reinhold Ewald has already enjoyed the experience of real orbit, and now investigates the installation of the same title in the K21.
For #32, Gerd Korinthenberg accompanies this experienced space traveler in the net.
More than the neon blue overalls with the emblem of the European space agency ESA on the chest distinguishes this visitor to Tomas Saraceno’s installation in orbit from other guests. With the unselfconscious aplomb of a sleepwalker, Reinhold Ewald negotiates the massive, swaying net structure that is spanned below the glass cupola of the K21. Anyone – like this trained physicist and experienced astronaut – with spends weeks at a time in real orbit will hardly be unnerved by the 30 meters of open space that descends to the piazza of the K21.
In 1997, after six years of training, Ewald and two cosmonaut comrades were launched into space on the Russian spacecraft Sojus TM-25 to perform scientific research in the MIR space station. Today, in place of a thundering rocket, a glass elevator transports the space traveler comfortably up to the installation in orbit, the work of an Argentinian artist.
“We were 400 kilometers up in space, and were able to see large segments of the Earth from above,” explains Ewald. He visibly enjoys climbing around the wide-spanned steel net – although from here, you can only see across the rooftops of Düsseldorf. “This guy seems to have no fear of heights at all,” comments one of the custodians at the edge of the installation. Not likely: this highly-trained German astronaut, a recipient of the Russian Medal of Courage, once survived a life-threatening fire in his space station.
“These are all mathematical surfaces, this is pure aesthetics,” remarks the veteran natural scientist with matter-of-fact brevity, describing the unconventional beauty of Saraceno’s 2500 square meter steel net. A nice compliment from a well-qualified authority – not only to the artist, but to the tiny spiders whose architectural artistry served as Saraceno’s model as well. The astronaut Ewald finds the idea of sending artists, with their singular sensibility and expressive capacities into space, captivating: “But we're not that far along yet!”
But in the end, a drop of sweat or two appear on the forehead of the 57-year-old, who finds that the only seemingly weightless progress through the elastic steel net is like walking in deep sand – “You're always moving uphill.” An artistic climb through in orbit is very different from the experience of genuine orbit: down here, every step is a struggle against the Earth's pull: “In zero gravity, you never sweat.”
Gerd Korinthenberg is head of the Department of Communication at the Kunstsammlung. He would like to thank Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) for the cooperation.
