Since a few decades already, to be more precise since 1972, we have abandoned the Moon. Who does not dream about a ‘Second Moon’, about a second time on the Moon?
It is a wonderful experience to be an astronaut. It is also a cruel one: because an astronaut’s memory is a man’s memory, and this experience is so extra-ordinary that it is in fact out-of-reach of our memory. What we can retain from these beyond-belief moments is, alas, so thin as compared to the feeling we have sensed, and, when touching Milene Guermont’s work, made from an innovating concrete, we can nearly access directly to what the Apollo astronauts must have felt when they stepped on the Moon. Some of them told me what it was like, with passion, this sensation of plenitude which took over their body. Focusing my mind on my most beautiful spatial emotions, I could trace, for a couple of seconds, a vanishing memory: blue and fragile vision of our planet, sailing through the infinitely obscure, eternal, darkness of the universe.
I send here a vibrant ‘Thank you’ to Guermont. She tries to revive through Art and Sciences intimately mixed what Humans may sometimes uncover in this world, what is the most beautiful in it, just at our hand, or so much further away… 

 

Patrick Baudry
Astronaut - UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, 2008