Codex Lunaris: Fictitious Cartographies and Non-Dystopian Futures

Abstract

Fictitious cartography and critical fabulation operate as epistemic strategies through which dominant narratives of space colonization and extraction may be interrogated. This article examines how the articulation of ruins, impossible monuments, quotidian scenes, and imagined fauna functions as a speculative dispositif for reflecting on fragility, precarity, critical temporalities, and alternative spatial relations. Through these visual constructions, the Moon is reconfigured from a neutral astronomical body into a symbolic and contested territory, where the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist within a shared interpretive field. The artistic project Codex Lunaris is analyzed as a fictitious archive that extends what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse,” mobilizing speculative fabrication as a critical methodology. Conceived as a laboratory of futures, the project challenges linear models of progress and extractivist paradigms in space exploration. It proposes instead that imagining non-dystopian futures requires foregrounding coexistence, micro-ecologies, and structural exposure as constitutive conditions of experience, thereby opening alternative modes of inhabiting and perceiving extraplanetary territories.