The project A Stone from the Moon (2015-2022) investigates historical, contemporary and future geopolitical power struggles and ideologies, and the role of architecture and urban planning in this context. A Stone from the Moon consists of two works, video installations based on photography, cartography and archival imagery: Ecumenopolis and Capital City.

The work Ecumenopolis departs from a specific aspect of the Cold War: the efforts on both sides, East and West, to extend their spheres of influence by means of art and culture. As a counterpart to Socialist Realism, the United States advanced modernist art as a vehicle for spreading Western values. This Cultural Cold War also took place on the front of architecture and urbanism.
Against this geopolitical background, Ecumenopolis zooms in on Greek architect-urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis and his role as a cultural agent of change. In the 1950s and 60s, Doxiadis developed many key projects across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and was responsible for the modernist master plans of Riyadh, Baghdad and Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Parallel to these influential commissions, he worked on his own mission: a visionary urbanist theory which he named ekistics, the science of human settlements. Its ultimate aim was a blueprint for a future city that would encompass the entire world: Ecumenopolis.
In the work Ecumenopolis a voice-over narrates about Doxiadis’ mission and his interdisciplinary network of inspirational fellows, the Delians, which he gathered annually on a boat in the Aegean Sea to contribute to his mission. The camera hovers around the island of Delos and its ancient city where Doxiadis would take them. In order to envision the urban future, they were to travel back in time. As the story unfolds, two different perspectives are interweaved on Doxiadis and his Delians, drawing both on official archives celebrating his architecture as a practice beyond politics, and on alternative sources that trace a more complex context.

The work Capital City investigates the evolution of Eurasia as a geographical, political and cultural concept, as well as a city of the future, Capital City, in the heart of Eurasia.
The work zooms in on Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of post-communist Kazakhstan between 1991-2019, who cast himself as a Eurasianist visionary and architect. The new capital city he erected from scratch in the Kazakh steppe was not just a nationalist project, but was also envisioned as the Heart of Eurasia, making this idea manifest as a concrete reality as well as a utopian project with much wider ramifications.
In the work Capital City, a voice-over narrative connects Nazarbajev’s Eurasian mission with earlier ideas explored by the Eurasianist movement just after the Russian Revolution as well as the Eurasian ideologies that are deeply entwined with the Kremlin today. The cyclical narrative underscores how, over the past hundred years, the idea of Eurasia continues to be resurrected, while the underlying visions and geopolitical implications also reveal significant shifts.

The project A Stone from the Moon is generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund, CBK Rotterdam and Cultuurfonds