The series "The Space of Time" was exhibited by Francisco Infante and his wife Nonna Gorionova in Moscow this year. It constituted a series of photo works created last summer in the Italian provinces of Reggio, Badalucco and Imperia. The exhibition contained 13 installed artefacts on duratranses (100 x 100 cm) with special lighting.

In the 60s, Francisco Infante, the Spanish emigrant and Russian none-conform artist, took part in the kinetic art movement and developed the foundation for the early Russian futuristic avant-garde. In the 70s, originating from Infante`s reflections on the correlation between nature and artificial undertaking, he and his wife Nonna Goriunova created the concept of "artefacts", i.e. installing artificial systems into nature which are analogous to natural phenomena.

Prior to that, Infante used the word "artefact" among many others without seeing the endless possibilities inhibited in its meaning and the way the artist conceived and took it up for his art works.

"I have become a connoisseur of the colouring that the leaves take on in autumn and I know all the voices and the moods of the woods and river valley. I have, in a measure, entered into communication with nature." (Clifford Simak, "A Choice of Gods"). It was Clifford Simak, the science-fiction writer who created fantastic extrapolations of the impact of science on society and who emphasized the responsibilities of technology and the importance of preserving human values, out of whose books the artist Infante took the name for his own art works - "artefacts". But Simak and Infante have more in common than just that: While Simak places humans in perspective against the vastness of the universe's time and space, Infante and his wife place artefacts into the world.

To Infante and Goriunova, artefacts primarily mean products of human art and workmanship, and are autonomous in relation to nature. At the same time, artefacts bear witness to the world`s continuity, which is surrounded by mystery.

"Time is still the great mystery to us.", (Clifford Simak, "Shakespeare`s Planet"). "Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.", (Cliffors Simak, "Ring around the Sun"). When Infante was introduced to Kantor`s theory of numerical mathematics, he realised that Kantor`s understanding of time and infinity corresponded with his idea of the world and at that stage began to transform his own ideas into art.

Infante`s and his wife`s artefacts are the 'package', its artificial tools the 'ingredients' described in Simak`s book "Cemetery World": "I find it a most intriguing and amusing thing that it might be possible to package the experiences, not only of ones self, but of other people. I have tried to imagine the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it - the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the colour and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before."

Francisco Infante`s and Nonna Goriunova`s artefacts are preserved as photographs, which are exhibited. What is special and fascinating about the couple's artefacts is that they are made without any kind of photomontage or computer simulation. A mirror that was laid down in the sand turns out to be a square piece of sky in the later photograph, having become an integrated part of the sandy ground. A further image shows a triangle made out of sand which is directly placed in the sky.

When looking at the image with the yellow planks, the stones, the light of the sun and the shadow, I am reminded of southern France; I can feel the sun and the shadow and smell of the air that I have (once) experienced (there) myself. "Space is an illusion and time as well." (Clifford Simak, "A Heritage of Stars"); and I cannot help but smile upon the image's and series title "The Space of Time".

Selma Stern