Gherman Titov (Vostok 2 landing site 47.0204)

Original painting, included in my solo exhibition Slow Creep at Project 78 Gallery.

Acrylic ink and gouache on board
370 x 220mm
2024

In the spring of 2024, I plotted a line of latitude (50.8518) through Project 78 Gallery on the south coast of England and followed it eastward online, creating a route
for a hypothetical circumnavigation—a virtual journey that would yield the imagery from which to make an exhibition. The impossible tour crossed 19 countries and two oceans—traversing cities, agricultural land, wilderness, mountains and lakes while locating multiple sites of cultural production, extractivism, protest, conflict, dispossession, extraterrestrial exploration, leisure and recreation.

Read more at https://jamieatherton.com/slow-creep/

The line of latitude passes through the spot where the reentry module of the Vostok 2 spacecraft crashed to earth on the morning of 7 August 1961 just moments after Gherman Titov, the 25-year-old cosmonaut piloting the mission, had ejected from the capsule and parachuted to safety. He was the second-ever person to orbit the earth and remains the youngest to do so. During the day Titov spent in space, he also became the first to orbit the planet multiple times (17) as well as to sleep, film, take a photograph and vomit in space.