FREE THE MOON
Video installation
Lena Skrabs (DE)
http://www.visionbakery.com/freethemoon
Free the Moon is a poetic mission. I am going to fly to the Moon in order to free it from the flags that have been left there in the course of six manned Moon landings from 1969 to 1972. The Moon belongs to loving ones and must be preserved for everyone’s dreams and visions. The technical implementation is possible – all I needs is 10 billion Euros. To make utopia come true, I started a crowdfunding campaign. I like to think an alleged foolish idea up to the end even though it will most probably fail. To dare trying to make the supposed impossible possible. The inpradictability of internet dynamics actually offers the small chance of making the mission come true.
FREE THE MOON – Lena Skrabs
Free the Moon is a poetic mission. Lena Skrabs will fly to the Moon in order to free it from the flags that have been left there in the course of six manned Moon landings from 1969 to 1972.
Since more and more private companies are developing programs for space mining, and more and more nations are planning flights to planets in our solar system, space law has gotten a new impulse. The US Senate and Congress recently (2015) approved a draft law, which declares outer space as being part of the US administration. The US President signed a document which gives America unlimited mining rights and the right to hand out mining licenses in space.
Who can claim and own what can be mined out there is one of the major issues in order to avoid new kinds of conflicts in the near future. The early treaties from 1967 up until 1979 – adopted by the UN – are not holding up anymore to recent developments that confront us with the dangers of monopolization of space resources. The colonization of space has just begun.
“The Moon belongs to loving ones and must be preserved for everyone’s dreams and visions.” (Lena Skrabs). Removing the flags from the moon is a symbolic action that might be hard to achieve, but the technical implementation is possible – all the artist needs is 10 billion euros. To make utopia come true, Lena Skrabs started a crowdfunding campaign.
The project is about raising awareness of the powers at play when imagining the future of space exploration and what and whom it should serve.
Lena Skrabs was born in Hamburg/Germany in 1990. After finishing her BA at Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Bonn, she is currently studying the Master program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus University Weimar. In her artistic work Lena Skrabs mainly tries to investigate the oddity of the human species. The work is connected in unconventional methods that trigger surprise and irritation and often reveal to its full extend only at second glance. She moreover uses the artistic freedom as a means to expand the limits of the possible. The poles of traditional craft skills and new media as well as the internet as the first bidirectional mass medium and the most public space is of particular interest to her. In her project Free the Moon she uses the internet to cross the border from cyberspace to outer space. In 2015 she was inter alia represented in the accompanying program of the 12th Biennale in Havana, exhibited at the media art fair Contemporary Art Ruhr in Essen and the Citizen Art Days in Berlin, worked as a member of the Viennese artists collective WochenKlausur and participated as part of Imaginary Bauhaus Museum in the 2nd Berliner Herbstsalon of Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin.
