Jules Verne
Around the Moon
This is an "Artist's Book", a project created during the educational project of the Hermitage Youth Center "The form and text". The artist's book is a specific term originated in the 19th century which means an artbook, a form of art that utilize the form of the book. The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and it constantly passes and replaces the exposition "Artist's Book". The task of the educational project is to create your own individual artist's book. The project ended with an exhibition of exclusive books. We worked on the book “Around The Moon”, a science fiction novel published in 1869 by Jules Verne. It is a sequel which continues the trip to the moon which was only partially described in the previous novel “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865). It’s a story about the five-day trip to the moon in a projectile, which was fired out of the giant space gun, along with its three passengers, Barbicane, Nicholl and Michael Ardan.
Space exploration became a reality during the 20th century. Rockets, satellites and many different spacecrafts were developed and improved to explore the outer space and planet’s surfaces. We are finding new planets, searching for the life in the outer space and even thinking about space colonization. Jules Verne's novel "Around the Moon" helps to look at the universe through the eyes of a person who lived in the 19th century. Travelers go to the moon, where no one has gone before. Therefore the writer fantasizes about life on the Earth's satellite and exploration of outer space. The reader of a novel works out his own perception and experience of the first flight into the space. Few of our contemporaries had a chance to experience it in reality. However, Jules Verne offers an excellent opportunity to image this adventure. You are travelling to the moon through the images and text, being immersed in a bizarre world created by artist, who imagined the space as a magical, thrilling and shimmering world.
Jules Verne was a real romantic. And our fundamental task is to represent this cosmic journey not only with the scientific vector, but also a romantic one because the travelers are adventurers and dreamers, who take risks for the sake of a great purpose for mankind and do not even doubt it.
For us "Around the Moon" is a romantic ballad, in which many physical laws don’t work, because the book was written in the 19th century when a lot new physical laws were already discovered. A lot of attention is paid to food and dialogues and enthusiastic fantasies about how is it to be there on the uncharted land. Even the solar system is represented by Jules Verne in the form of fruits and vegetables.
We tried to convey a space and travelers mood by using materials that correspond to the sensations and ideas about space, such as foil and different paper. Jules Verne describes many events associated with lighting. Basing on novel we used certain light aimed at the crafted objects and collages created from paper and foil. While working on this book, we learned a lot and traveled too: to the moon, in the prism of time and our vision, following Jules Verne and his fearless heroes.
Alena Madyanova, Daria Taran
