Stary Mwaba follows a socio-political starting point in his painting as well as his installation-like works, generating links between the current socio-economic situation in Zambia, his country of origin, and historical events. His installation in Künstlerhaus Bethanien deals with an event in Zambian history that was significant in a utopian as well as an historical sense: at the beginning of the 1960s, when the former British colony became independent and the state of Zambia was founded, teacher and visionary Makuka Nkoloso set up a space flight programme that was both ambitious and – in face of lacking technology and limited financial means – belittled as completely crazy by the former colonial rulers in particular. Besides drawings, sketches and paintings based on materials in the Zambian national archives, Stary Mwaba is showing the sculpture DKALO-1 (2015), which reflects Nkoloso’s model of a type of space capsule: it is a large-scale balloon encased in typical bright-patterned, local materials.