In July 1969, the Apollo 11 ship was launched to outer space. Its final destination: the Moon. Two of its crew members would become the first men to step foot on this satellite, however, an endless number of theories quickly emerged denying the veracity of this historic affair.

The same event serves as theme for Georges Méliès’ short feature film Le voyage dans la lune (1902). Inspired on the same-titled short story by Jules Verne, this blatant montage –and first fiction film ever made– shows what a profitable disadvantage the complete ignorance of the behavior of objects and human body on the Moon’s surface was. This representation crisis certainly stimulated the imagination and creativity.

This book is traced upon the tension provoked by both moments of the same event, and it wishes to explore the aesthetic encounter, that is, how a spectator reacts to uncommon objects or situations. The work of the featured artists is constructed through images and objects of an nondescript nature, it tends to annihilate the primacy of the artwork as an immediate source of experience and relegate its physical presence to the background. Between purely documentary and purely fictional, the works brought together in this selection are a trace of something that may have never taken place. Through different media, the eight summoned artists offer different propositions on how the opening of an aesthetic space involves the opening of a political one.

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