'Kosmic Memories': Vincent Fournier

Kosmic memories reveals the extraordinary totems of an imagined future civilization. It is not by chance that this science fiction universe was born between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s in the non-aligned countries of the former Russia. The obsession with the cosmos is an old tropism of the Russian imagination – Tsiolkovsky, Sputnik and Gagarin to name a few – and with the softening between East and West, artistic creation freed itself from political dogmas. If all these buildings have different functions – commemorative, political, institutional – their forms testify to the same breath; the invention of a future imbued with science fiction. We can see flying saucers, space stations and a multitude of geometrical shapes from another planet. Built mostly in concrete and at the tops of stellar landscapes, a telluric power from elsewhere emerges from these monumental architectures. Their location, while often a place of memory, also coincides with dawn or dusk, with a lateral light that reinforces their strangeness. Brutalist, futuristic, utopian, mystical, eso- teric beauty... between Tintin’s ‘Temple of the Sun’ and the monolith from ‘2001, Space Odyssey’, these sentinels embody the dream of a future that is always to come.