Calm

Juri Gagarin – the first human to journey into outer space – right before the launch of his space rocket. Above his head the constellation of the Cassiopeia the Greek Queen who was keen enough to challenge the Gods. His portrait is ingrained in wooden bars of former fruit and vegetable boxes.
There is an anecdote about the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war: Facing the fact that conventional ballpoint pens did not work under the conditions of zero gravity, NASA started a huge and expensive research program to create a ballpoint pen which could be used in weightlessness. The Soviets had to face the same problem, but found a much simpler solution by replacing the ballpoint pens with pencils. In my eyes, this short anecdote describes a typical Russian behavior: Always search for the easiest and least stressful way to solve a problem. I was living right above a small fruit shop. So, it was an easy solution for me to take some of the old boxes from the shop to create a background for the cosmonaut.
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