WASHINGTON, July 26 (RIA Novosti) – A team of Russian artists has built a massive pyramid containing a model of the Mir space station and says it plans to display the work at the iconic “Burning Man” counterculture arts festival next month in the Nevada desert.
Made entirely of wood, the installation consists of a pyramid standing 36 feet (11 meters) tall enclosing a scale model of the now-defunct Soviet and Russian space station.
Visitors to the installation will have the opportunity to write messages that will later be burned together with the entire structure at the festival in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada.
“We believe that the Mir space station was an amazing example of human cooperation and friendship,” the Russian art collective Pustye Holmy, or “Empty Hills,” said on their Kickstarter page to raise funds for the project.
“For us, Russians who were born in the 70s and 80s, thinking of Mir always evokes a feeling of nostalgia for the good old days when space pioneers were driven only by the passion to explore and not by money or power.”
The Soviet Union launched the Mir space station into low orbit in 1986. It continued to operate until 1998 and was sunk in the Pacific Ocean in a so-called “spacecraft cemetery” in March 2001.
Every year tens of thousands of visitors flock to the week-long Burning Man festival, which takes its name from a massive wooden effigy of a man that is set on fire during the celebration. This year’s event will run from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2.
