Space exploration is one of the few things that still arrives wrapped in a language of common purpose. Against the backdrop of Trump’s presidency, a sustained torrent of cruelty, authoritarianism, and institutional abuse directed both inward at American citizens and outward at the rest of the world, we can almost pretend that the launch of the Artemis II presents itself as an improbable exception: ambitious, technical, and uplifting. A rocket leaves Earth and its atmosphere; Humanity reaches towards the stars. Even for those repelled by the political order from which it emerges, there is the easy temptation to treat space exploration as a neutral good, or at least as a temporary reprieve from the violence of the present.

The last (for now) man to walk on the moon did so before I was born, so I can't speak from experience, yet it is not difficult to understand the appeal of this superhuman feat; The iconography of the first moon landing remains powerful precisely because it appears to transcend politics. The most famous images of Apollo are not of procurement contracts, military infrastructures, or geopolitical competition, but of men walking on the moon, rendering the act of walking as stripped of all friction, rendered sublime. These walks became a universal gesture, recoded as the movement of humanity itself. This image, iconic, asks to be received with wonder.

But it warrants to be suspicious. The planetary spectacle of heroic space exploration is also the latest extension of the colonial imagination: the dream of reaching the periphery first, naming it, mapping it, mastering it, and extracting from it. The frontier has always been one of empire’s preferred fictions. It casts conquest as curiosity, occupation as discovery, and exploitation as progress. Space, in this narrative, is simply the next territory to be drawn into the orbit of elite ambition. Even satire has grasped this with precision. In Don’t Look Up, one of the film’s sharpest jokes is that an extinction-level meteor is not to be destroyed, but monetised. The end of the world itself must first be processed as a business opportunity.

But, walking matters, and not only as a metaphor. Walking can be disciplined, managed, and aestheticised, but it can also be the medium for refusing imposed routes. The moon walk is presented as the highest expression of collective human aspiration, yet it is also a carefully staged image of controlled movement in a conquered environment. The walker is heroic because the territory has already been technologically subdued. There is no uncertainty in the route, no contest over who gets to be there, and little visible trace of the economic system that made the image possible.

Back on Earth, the politics of walking is less abstract. Trump’s America has also produced the large anti-authoritarian marches of the No Kings protests: public acts of collective movement meant to make visible the refusal of tyranny. These marches also produce spectacle, interrupting the normal circulation of the city, declaiming that the existing order is neither natural nor accepted. But the political march is also highly legible. It is scheduled, routed, sloganised, monitored, and made immediately available for circulation through any and all available channels, which also makes it vulnerable to recuperation.

The more uncertain and potentially radical question begins when the official route ends. What does it mean to keep walking, to stay in opposition, after the protest has dispersed? How does one leave the permitted choreography behind and move into the commercialised, securitised, and privatised landscapes that generated dissent in the first place? Protest is not a culmination; we need to examine the city after the slogans have faded and attend to, even force, the emotional and political change of urban space.

Every contemporary march runs the risk of being absorbed into civic branding, political logistics, and platform imagery. A demonstration becomes a content stream, and resistance becomes a backdrop, or a series of likes in your feed. Dissent becomes another pause in the endless flow of spectacle. The real challenge is whether we collectively can still exceed that capture, whether we can produce not just representation, but transformation.
I waver. On good days, I'm convinced a better world for all (outside the Epstein class and their ilk) is within reach. On others, I'm sure we're perhaps only months away from complete global annihilation.

A different image of political movement emerged this past week in Cuba, where people rode bicycles and electric tricycles along the Malecón waterfront in protest against U.S. sanctions and fuel restrictions. Here movement was not framed by the triumphalist vocabulary of progress, but by endurance and persistence. Not a fantasy of mastery over new terrain, but a practical and political response to, for all intents and purposes, a permanent condition of siege.
Cuba’s internal contradictions and problems are real and should not be romanticised away, though I also get tired of always having to hedge like this. Castro himself pointed out that "They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?" and we can now also question the claimed successes of capitalism in the US or Europe.
So, it is not difficult to understate the anti-colonial significance of Cuba's continued survival under decades of American punishment and abuse: Empire reorganises everyday movement as a way of disciplining life itself; It makes mobility expensive, scarce, and fragile, in the service of Big Capital.

In this context, forced slowness became politically charged, showing how physical movement and exertion became representative of adaptation and persistence, if also of exposure.
As walking artists, we know that to move slowly through the city allows one to encounter the consequences of power at a bodily scale, such that, if we care to look, it is easy to internalise how scarcity, nor dignity, are not an abstraction. If we care to look, movement at a slow pace can become a way of perceiving the textures of survival under pressure, and in Cuba, or Iran, how social life persists when empire tries to make it logistically impossible.

So Cuba, though cycling, offers a lesson for walking as artistic practice. If the Artemis spectacle lifts our eyes upward toward a future of engineered transcendence, Cuba redirects our gaze to the world below, to the ordinary infrastructures through which political violence is actually lived. A sanitised vision of humanity expanding beyond the planet, versus human beings reworking daily movement under conditions imposed by their imperial neighbour. The same, it doesn't really need to be said, who is papering over their behaviour by sending those men (and woman) to the moon.

The United States took on the Western Imperial mantle from Europe after the Second World War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, some of us briefly believed in the End of History, but instead of greater cooperation, we have seen the last hegemon become more and more irate.
The burden Cuba is carrying will not be just Cubans to bear. With the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, and with oil transport through the Strait of Hormuz under increasing pressure, the fantasy of frictionless mobility, always under control of Empire, is more brittle by the day. The same system that promises limitless movement for capital and military power can quickly produce immobilisation, shortage, and crisis for ordinary man. Already, with the chokepoint tightening, more and more people are forced into the kind of low-energy mobility that Cuba has long been compelled to normalise. The Cuban example then stops being an exotic image of resilience elsewhere and becomes the lifted curtain of our shared future.

As the Global North has propagated for decades, even centuries, one path towards possible resolution is to construct better supply chains, smarter logistics, and more efficient resource management. An other path is political, an opportunity to ask what kinds of relationships, and movement, should organise life in the first place. Arguably, then, walking does not merely have to be what remains when fuel is expensive; it can be a medium that counters the spectacle’s promises of speed, conquest, and endless expansion, in the service of a shared humanity, insisting on the common ground beneath grand narratives.

I don't have to tell you that movement is never neutral. It is always embedded in, and often subservient to, systems of power, imagination, and control. And, so, we do have to be cautious; the most urgent walks are not always the most triumphant, or visually impressive. A camera almost accidentally recorded Tank Man, but personal resistance often begins after the cameras leave, and after the energy to keep going runs out.

Keep walking.

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