Gagarin is a local events magazine, similar to the Reader in SD, or the SF Weekly in SF, and they throw a pretty amazing party when they want to, usually associated with cool art spaces, and great bands, with fringe artists in attendance. Yours truly, being one of said fringe dickweeds...uh...i mean artists...well I just had to attend now didn't I...
Prepare to LAUNCH...sequence initaited...
Helped some friends make killer costumes on the very low budget of free cardboard and the paints I could scrounge, an old helmet for myself and some cell phones that were to be recycled this week... Not a bad turn out for the supplies at hand don't ya think...
Late night session to hash out the ideas, and make some custom fittings over beers...
Livia's Costume idea... Eliot with E.T. along for the ride in front of the moon...
with Gerty in tow...
Franny 2 Hands had to work the gig, making labour intensive drinks for the crowd so she needed something more mobile. She opted for a ziggy stardust look...
I wanted to go for something more abstract and interactive...I called it Lost In Space. Or in Italian...
Which translates into "all the texts lost in space..."
Phone in the back (there is no need for a zero in space by the way)...
space all around...
and a broken satellite to blame for the lost messages...
The idea was to have people write messages in space, like the dirty ones we shouldnt send late at night, or the ones that if not received would cause panic... People did write stuff on it, including a woman who walked up to me out of no-where, asked for the marker (in Italian) and kneeled down to scribble on my one-dimensional space crotch "I want to go to the moon" (also in Italian) which by the time my howling friends translated for me she had disappeared.
And the party was launched...
Not sure what this costume is but I know for a fact the same guy harassing women with the banana protector wrote the shocker text...
costumes ranged from complex to last minute but were all really great!
The re-entry back to earth was not as smooth as the launch... but that's the nature of space travel isn't it?
In the end my costume made little sense to the Italians, but I got more than a handful of people to scribe messages on it nonetheless...most of which I will spend a little time translating this week...
and some that are quite well understood across language barriers...
Ultimately what I liked about the night the best was being able to put my creative skills to work to physically make something for my friends. It was a fun night and made me feel more connected to Italy and all I have here, something I have actually been struggling with the last few weeks.
Its good to be back on earth again, in the present and mindful of things to come.
S.
