Moon City
Moon City (2020–2025) is a photographic project created with a mobile phone and a telescope. From the vantage point of his East London balcony, Mimi Mollica aligned his lens on two opposing forces: the Moon’s ancient, celestial presence and the steel-and-glass monuments of London’s financial district. Over five years, these prolonged observations evolved into a sustained inquiry into power, fragility, and the shifting conditions of human existence.
Developed against the backdrop of pandemic lockdowns, war, genocide, and the expanding influence of political and financial oligarchies, Moon City contemplates the tense and often perilous dialogue between humanity and the systems that shape, govern, and endanger it. The project juxtaposes the Moon’s constancy, an enduring symbol of nature, time, and ancestral wisdom, with the restless verticality of capitalist ambition and its architecture of unchecked accumulation.
At its core, Moon City is a meditation on our contemporary condition: a world suspended between wonder and control, introspection and acceleration, the individual and the machine. Through its subtle distortions, aberrations, and lunar apparitions, the work invites viewers to pause, look upward, and consider the forces—celestial, structural, and ideological—that shape our lives, our cities, and our futures.
Book Design by Ramon Pez
Text by Iain Sinclair and Brad Feuerhelm
Co-Published with Dewi Lewis Publishing
Printed at Mas Matbaa, Turkey