ABSTRACT
A nonarchitectural sham ruin takes center stage in this chapter, Aleksei Fedorchenko’s film First on the Moon (Pervye na Lune; 2005). This film is taken as a sham ruin because it has the look and feel of a documentary, although it is never supposed to work like one. Yet this disjunction allows the film to function as a mediation on the relationship between the past and possibility. Reflecting the thought of Paolo Virno, the film paradoxically suggests that it is looking into the past which creates alternatives to the present. In fact, this idea will be taken one step further: First on the Moon shows that potentiality is only located in the past and never in the future. The other key example for this discussion is Pierre Huyghe’s short video One Million Kingdoms (2001).
