Photo: Viktor Petrov

Viktor Petrov’s installation „Chew&Screw“ transports us to a speculative model of an (extra)terrestrial Boy Scout settlement. It humorously emphasizes a contradiction that arises between technological advancement and the modern idea of progress. The efficient, modernist formal language of camping stoves and the historical connection between astronomical mirrors and hotplates trace the contours of an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, they are used to reproduce human life; on the other to discover and claim new territory. They also mark out two different spaces: the interior, the homely, and the exterior, the risky and adventurous.

The current race to the moon, and for its rare “earths”, is producing spectacular media images of rocket launches and lunar rovers. Images of hope for a future, where mankind is no anymore bound to the roots of its existence. The English phrase “chew and screw” describes the act of leaving a restaurant without having paid the bill; anyone who does not flee quickly enough is caught, like an spacecraft launched toward the cosmos that fails to achieve the escape velocity needed to break free of earth’s gravity.