Lydia Matthews, in collaboration with San Francisco-based filmmaker Jeanne C. Finley, were given a 2015 CEC Artslink Project Award to support “Entering the Cosmos”, a video and socially-engaged project in Kazakhstan made in partnership with Almaty-based artist Katya Nikonorova and the Eurasian Cultural Alliance. Through archival research, interviews with Kazakh residents about the space program and their memories of Soviet-era science fiction, and a series of hands-on art/science/videography workshops with local teens, they will investigate how Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome fuels the region’s scientific research industry as well the collective imagery, serving as a platform for imagining parallel realities and alternative futures at a moment when nationalism is being redefined.
