A performed photo‐novel by Mathias Kryger & Honey Biba Beckerlee
Performance and exhibited script.
Space Dog Odyssey – A Cold War Romance is a performance based on a written manuscript in combination with images and video material, along with a soundtrack of pop songs. One could say that this is a performance that would like to be a fictional documentary film: The layers of the text blend with images, video and music.
50 years after the two Russian space dogs Belka and Strelka were sent up into space, Honey Biba Beckerlee and Mathias Kryger, tell the story of Strelka, who unlike her predesessor Laika, returned to earth.
Here we follow in the footsteps of Strelka from street dog to national icon to mother alongside a parallel narrative of the summit in Vienna in 1961 between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy.
In a post‐humanist, queer reading of the Cold war we aim to completely rewrite the history of the cold war by confusing man and dog producing a narrative where warm hearts melt the iron curtain and the Berlin Wall was never erected. Through this narrative we question the idea of history writing as such and by working with fictional layers on top of researched historical narrative we aim at blurring the ideas of fixed identity positions within the broader historical framework of history.