Chapter 1 — Towards the Moon

This refusal is the hinge of what we are doing. In a world addicted to being seen, disappearance becomes a method of truth. Qu Yuan’s gesture — to leave, to stop performing for a corrupt stage — reads now like a preface to our project. The Moon, our celestial satellite, offers the same option on a planetary scale: a place without audience, where a single act can no longer be amplified into spectacle. To vanish there is not to hide from danger; it is to refuse the self-limiting economy of attention in the pursuit of a natural extension of a wider sense for mankind.

Western culture has reached a saturation point. What once looked like useful contest — public debate, the sharpening of opinion — has become a theater of outrage, a commerce of performative virtue that maximizes social engagement into personal branding. A civilization falling under the weight of simulated virtue. Before it turned into the pervasive  display of what we can see as viral numbing anger at every level of society, I was truly into what seemed handy, say accessible, “moral fights”: rational debates made to bettering things, accessible to the common people.

This said, I don’t want to flee from reality, but when I look up to the Moon, it is not in hope, somehow it is in exhaustion. Silent and untouchable it becomes the only space unpolluted by narratives where masses, hypnotized by small shiny screens and algorithms, are pushed one against the other, destroying public debate in exchange for an ethos of radicalized illusions. Still: the Moon is there. Untouched by all the madness. It is not the next frontier of conquest, but the first retreat from tensions, rubbles and illusions.

I do not propose retreat as cowardice. I would like to start a project that creates the conditions for a new beginning. The Moon, untouchable and silent, is the field on which to make that new start meaningful. A place without audience, without applause. To go there is not to conquer, but to vanish.

Camouflage is the instrument of that refusal but for contemplation. On Earth it was born to deceive, to ambush, to survive war. On the Moon there is no enemy, no audience, purpose except disappearance. Lunar camouflage, then, is not concealment for the sake of concealment but the first tool for a post-narcissistic civilization.  It is no survival gear, it is a second skin for those who have chosen to lave the belief of showing off for the sake of showing off.

It mirrors regolith—porous, irregular, pale, absorbing—so that a human body becomes an echo of the terrain. Every fold of fabric catches light like dust; every thread conceals rather than proclaims. The garment’s purpose is not to erase the wearer but to translate their presence into the logic of a new polyphonic existentialism.

To inhabit a place without ownership is to be its humblest guest. It recognizes itself as a practical condition for a culture exhausted by spectacle: a person who opts out of public performance in order to preserve inner life. Disappearance here is not a denial of society and community but a re-definition of them: what survives through coordination, not applause. From the perspective of a long civilization, one that remembers dynasties rather than seasons, this act of vanishing reads as maturity, not defeat. The understanding that progress without interiority leads to ruin. The lunar camouflage becomes a statement for a new unimaginable culture: quiet, exact, unbroadcasted. Technically the idea looks almost primitive by design because it doesn’t use at first glance flashy solutions. Efficiency and intelligence are not the exclusive property of fancy hardware; they can be expressed through humble tools. The textile we imagine echoes the lunar surface: matte, particulate, unstable. It renders movement into a grey folding shadow that the eye resists as a distinct object.

Who physically reached the Moon first were not explorers but actors.

A televised ascent.

A recorded landing.

A flag.

The whole event reduced to the narrative of being “first”.

The American landing was less a step for mankind than a rehearsal for the Age of Simulation. What matters wasn’t the dust beneath the booth, but the broadcast. From that moment on truth and reality became indistinguishable. The race to the moon has never been about arrival, it was about control of the lens. The first total entertainment.

Half a century later another civilization rises with a whole different temperament. Where the precedent one sought exposure, the eastern gaze preferred continuity, balance, the quiet coordination of vast systems. One culture colonized the screens, the other mastered the horizon. On Earth this difference was perceived as decorative. On the moon it becomes decisive. For the ones trained to perform, the lunar surface is only an empty stage. For the ones trained to integrate, it is where they know to belong. Where one culture sought exposure, another seeks continuity: a steady, systemic coordination that values integration above proclamation.

The Western astronaut still carries the burden of spectacle. A reframing of studio lights. A desire to be witnessed and recognized. A gleaming white suit, the portable advertisement of cultural purity and the kind of weird self impression to  be the pinnacle of contemporaneity, “on the right side of history”.  So the astronaut arrives, plants the flag, declares mission accomplished. The Western culture cheers. The other ones respond with shivers down their spine at the memory of similar actions. They experienced this carelessness before on their skin.

If we imagine a Moon landing now, the Eastern cosmonaut seems to move differently, calibrating the presence to rhythm of the majestic landscape.  The aim is not to be seen, but to belong. To belong, extend and integrate the continuum of perception to this new soil. In the western vocabulary this not seeking to shine looks like invisibility. Not appropriate for such achievement. In the Chinese one it reads as harmony.

The new contest is philosophical, not merely geopolitical. One strand measures success by visibility—flags planted, broadcasts made, firsts proclaimed. The other measures it by erasure: the capacity to exist with minimal disturbance, to operate without noise. The garments we propose are prototypes of this latter judgment. They are textile manifestos for suits, habitats, machines—objects that allow a civilization to be surrounded by infinite light and remain, quietly, part of its field.

Camouflage, in this sense, becomes correspondence rather than deception. To blend is to accept that dominance has lost its functional meaning here. The fabric becomes yielding, fluent; power is procedural, patient, self-effacing rather than theatrical. The first people who learn to move without asserting will not need to brag; they will have outlasted the need for superiority. On lunar soil the task is not to perform existence but to sustain it. Wearing camouflage on the Moon is not to vanish from being—it is to belong to a vast dimension with certainty.