Untitled

What if Zambia had put the first person on the moon instead of the United States? The launch of a Zambian space flight programme during the heyday of the international space race in the 1960s forms the starting point of Cristina De Middel’s series The Afronauts. In this series, the photographer creates a fantasy world in which fact and fiction intermingle, and the Western stereotypical perception of the African continent is questioned. By alternating staged scenes with copies of typed letters and reproductions of vintage photographs, the true and the fake are woven together. In this archived letter, the Zambian Ministry of Technology is enquiring about the funding of the space programme. In the end, the programme was discontinued for lack of funding.