No Gravity by Silvia Casalino

• Print
• Email

Apr 01

2013

by Thilina Heenatigala

Published: Monday, April 01 2013 15:41

• Previous
• Next

No Gravity documentry by Silvia Casalino on 14 April at 18:00 - 19:30 UT live on CosmoQuest.

Space engineer Silvia Casalino dreams of going to space. Her dreams become reality as she embarks on an unusual and bizarre journey, which leads her to the icons of female space travel and cyborg culture. The documentary film No Gravity is both a personal story, and a broader take on the history of women in space and the relationship between gender and technology.  

No Gravity tells the stories of women who have dedicated their lives to the space endeavour, establishing their position in the male-dominated world of space technology. Three generations of women, based on three different continents, will guide the audience in pursuing a single fascination: the space sciences and technology.

The film’s form is based on the cyborg theme. Using imagery of nature, technology, humans, machines, and animals in space suits, the film creates a humorous, associative narrative that is provocative and deconstructs standard stereotypes and forms of representation.  From rocket launch pads in the jungle of French Guiana, to flying frogs in space, to tropical plants between the ISS mock-ups in Star City (Russia) and incredible archive images from the French and Russian space agencies, No Gravity is a film between science and fiction, mixed with both humour and curiosity.

No Gravity is a production of www.perfectshotfilms.com

###

Artist bio:

Silvia Casalino, born in 1971 in Savigliano, Italy, has a Master’s degree in Space Engineering and worked for ten years on Ariane 5 rockets for the French Space Agency (CNES). As a female space engineer working in a very gendered field, she questions the neutrality of science and technology. During a fellowship in 2009 at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, she developed the documentary No Gravity. She has studied the archives of the US, Soviet, and European space programs, examined the political controversies that surround those programs, and conducted interviews with female protagonists of space exploration.