‘Muttnik’ Sriwhana Spong, 2005
In 1957 the USSR launched the first dog into space aboard Sputnik 2. Laika was a stray, rounded up from the streets of Moscow, and trained for spaceflight. The American press nicknamed her ‘muttnik’, a name that eventually became synonymous with the Sputnik programme. Russian scientists believed that strays could easily adapt to the extreme stresses of space travel, while females were chosen because of their easy temperament.
Muttnik 2005 is part of an education, a home schooled exploration into the shadowed parts of my lineage. In Muttnik I skim the surface of Balinese culture, taking what I want, and adding to it what I know. This homeland of my father is a glimmer of something fed to me through shadows, and whispers, and therefore I must make it my own. By borrowing, stealing and adapting, I can make as many bastards as I want, create as many muttniks as necessary.
Muttnik is a navigation of launching pads, portals and points of entry into the unknown, just as altars are points of mediation between the religious and their gods. Filmed in my parent’s backyard, in a shady suburb of Auckland that spooks me out at night, Muttnik is a study of formations based on Balinese offerings. These offerings are constructed from the everyday: rice cakes, fruit, cooked chickens, palm leaves. Their environment dictates their form, and so it is with my models. Poles of apples covered in smoking incense, strings of cigarettes, black and white striped plastic bags which carried purchases bought in Bali, create an environment that looks like the setting for an odd carnival, or a pagan ritual. The original symbolic meaning or function of Balinese offerings was not my intent, so these models became shadows harking back to an original source. Located in the fog somewhere between being lost and found.
Sriwhana Spong