The "la Caixa" Foundation, the Cajasol Foundation and Cordoba City Council offer the exhibition 'Other Worlds'
Córdoba's Mayor, José Mª Bellido; CaixaBank's Territorial Director for Eastern Andalusia and Murcia, Juan Ignacio Zafra; and the Cajasol Foundation's delegate in Córdoba, Mili Jiménez, together with curator Kike Herrero, recently inaugurated the exhibition "Other worlds. A Journey Through the Solar System with Michael Benson". The exhibition brings together 40 very beautiful images of our solar system obtained by different planetary missions and which have subsequently been processed and treated by the American photographer, artist and writer Michael Benson.
One of the main objectives of the "la Caixa" Foundation and the Cajasol Foundation is to bring culture, science and knowledge closer to society. Dissemination is a basic instrument for promoting the growth of people, and for this reason both entities are working to bring knowledge closer to audiences of all ages and levels of training.
This exhibition forms part of the "Art in the Street" programme through which the “la Caixa” Foundation and Cajasol Foundation aim to showcase the work of internationally renowned artists in order to turn Cordoba into an open-air museum. On this occasion, they are doing so through an artistic-scientific marriage. The "Art in the Street" programme began in 2006, and since then it has brought the creations of leading modern artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore and the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado to the public. Now, with Benson's help, the programme includes a new line centred on science and nature.
Passionate about science, Benson chooses and treats original black and white images using different filters and combines them to create other colour images, sometimes using up to a hundred of them, to compose the seamless mosaics shown in the exhibition: fascinating panoramas that, even today, are beyond direct human experience.
The deep fascination with the night sky has been a recurring theme in the history of civilization. Yet it was not until the launch of the first satellite to orbit the Earth in 1957 that mankind ventured into space. In the seven decades since then, the first major surveys of the extraordinarily diverse worlds that make up the solar system have been carried out, giving rise to a bold and absolutely momentous story. Some of these contributions are those that convey the images of 'Other worlds'.
Since the beginning of space exploration, we have seen our planet reduced to the size of a pearl, and later to the dimensions of a pixel, as a result of the trips our robotic ambassadors (unmanned space probes) have made to places never visited by human beings. For 'Other Worlds', the visual legacy left by these journeys should not be valued only because of its scientific importance, but also as a unique chapter in the history of photography.
The result of this work graphically confirms the veracity of that utopian programmatic statement made by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian space flight visionary, in 1912: "The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever".
Michael Benson (31 March 1962) works at the intersection of art and science. A writer, artist and filmmaker, during the last decade Benson has staged a series of increasingly large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography internationally. He takes raw data from planetary science archives and processes it, creating large-format landscapes. He edits, composites, mosaics, and then finally optimizes these images, producing seamless photographs of landscapes currently beyond direct human experience.
His exhibition 'Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System', featuring an original new hour-long ambient composition by Brian Eno titled Deep Space, opened in the Jerwood Gallery of the Natural History Museum in London on January 22nd, 2016
It has since been exhibited at Vienna’s Natural History Museum and the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia. It opens in Barcelona, Spain, at the CosmoCaixa museum on March 9, 2018.
His book 'Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time', published in 2014, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His latest work, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece examines the four year long production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been published on the 50th anniversary of that film’s release.
The exhibition will be open from October 13 to November 5, 2020 on Bulevar Gran Capitán (12-16) in Córdoba. The visits are for the general public and open 24 hours a day for free visits.
