Scribbling on the Moon: The Melancholia of Lunar Nullius

Set on the Moon in the final days of its first human colony, Mooncop articulates a powerful and lasting glimpse of the complex melancholia of the legal condition. It displays a subject that is captured as an absence within the archive of law’s ratio scripta, a legal subject that is contingent upon an outside it can never reach. Underlying the attempted escape trajectory of Mooncop’s surface narrative, we find not only Neil Armstrong’s legal footprints in the lunar sand, but also the more thorough scribbling of power upon the ambiguously internal/external legal space of the Moon. In seeking to present an escape from a legality that has translated the Moon into the symbolic order of law’s jurisdiction, pushing the frontier of civilisation out into space, Mooncop encounters complex normative dynamics of drawing colonial lines of power into an imagined beyond, and ultimately confronts the (im)possibility of escaping the law.