#lademiddel

England -

It is not an easy task to interview Cristina De Middel after her brilliantly designed self-published photobook, The Afronauts, has been multi-awarded, multi-reviewed and exhibited almost everywhere. Re-imagining the failed Zambian Space Program, as conceived by grade school science teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who produced the equipment and trained 11 Zambian astronauts (and an ‘undetermined amount of cats’) to beat the U.S. and the Soviets to the surface of the moon and Mars by 1964, the artist ‘documented an impossible dream that only lives in the pictures’.

I meet Cristina, a charismatic Spanish photographer, for breakfast in East London, on the Saturday morning, 13th April, 2013, before her Deutsche Börse photography prize exhibition’s opening at The Photographers Gallery.

  Since you have been asked so many questions, I am going to ask you a favour: to imagine for a moment to have an encounter with your double, like Borges in his short story ‘Borges and I’, what would ask yourself?

I am not sure, I could ask anything. I think one of the things that’s not easy to understand in the book right away – and it’s nothing to do with the magic of the story or that of Africa – is more: what do I think about the Zambian Space Program? If I think it is impossible or not, because if you look at the book I don’t state it, I just present the story, and don’t say whether they went or not. I don’t, in a way, position myself. So I would ask myself if I think it’s possible or impossible, if it was a good idea or a bad idea. But I wouldn’t know the answer.