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On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the Moon. I was a small child living in Bonn, West Germany, when I saw this gesture on TV. I understood that it was a very important thing, even though I could not grasp why. What does it mean to plant a flag to declare a place one’s own?

When the astronauts left, the exhaust of their engine blew the flag over. The act survived its fall. Today it rises again at the Moon’s south pole, where ice reserves are coveted, and in the Arctic, laid open by our own heat. In the installation, the gesture is repeated and taken apart. The flag stands on a mountain of survival blankets, made from the same NASA films as the skin of the lunar module. A material of conquest became a material of rescue, trapping a body’s heat the way greenhouse gases trap the Earth’s. The flagpole is a snow pole I found run over in a Longyearbyen ditch, an instrument of orientation crushed by the traffic it was meant to guide. A fan lifts the flag, then lets it fall. The pride lasts as long as the current. Around the mountain lies what conquest leaves behind. Pipes laid over thawing ground. Signals from the SOUSY radar in Adventdalen sounding the sky. Rain coming through the roof of the exhibition space, collected in buckets. Against the certainty of the flag, the title doubts. In French, perdre le nord means to lose one’s bearings. The north is melting away. Who has the right to possess this land, and who has the right to mourn it?