Sylvie Bonnot has made the conquest of space her playground.

At CNES, from 2017, where she created polymorphic works from archival documents on stratospheric balloons; then in 2019, by traveling to Baikonur in Kazakhstan, to a site which was the flagship of the Soviet aviation industry.

However, what interests Sylvie Bonnot is not to account for technological prowess, but to observe what this myth of the conquest of space produces in us, what it awakens with national pride and desire for elsewhere.

Hundreds of tourists flock to the Baikonur Desert every year: the Baikonur Tour was designed to delight the eyes and the imaginations.

But where are we exactly? The site exudes artificiality as much as it feels like a movie.

In a daring face-to-face, Sylvie Bonnot plunges the viewer into the blacks and whites of her large Mues, produced from scientific archives. Their material has been transmuted by the work process of the artist who creates her own archive of the conquest of space – an artificial archive questions scientific proof by image.

Extract from the text written by Hélène Jagot

The Baikonour Tour project benefits from the support of the Drac Bourgogne – Franche-Comté by means of a Creation Grant in 2020 and assistance from the FEAC, the DRAC Guyane, for GSS, the Guyanese component of the current program, in 2021.


Baikonour Tour / Vol.1