Projeto Apollo (2000)

Combining artfully designed sets and digital processing, Santos recreates the historic Apollo lunar landing for this essayistic video, which uses simulation to interrogate representation. Relating a long-circulated rumor that the landing was actually faked in a NASA film studio — an opinion reputedly held by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, among others — Santos delicately negotiates the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction. As he notes in his on-screen text, the coming of the Internet makes any purported fact "easy to say, hard to prove."