MOON CITY: MIMI MOLLICA AND IAIN SINCLAIR

As a young man and throughout his life, Swedenborg was committed to devising a superior method for calculating longitude using ‘lunars’—that is, the respective distances between the Moon and different stars. So much was his enthusiasm that in 1712, aged twenty-four, Swedenborg met with Edmond Halley in Oxford, and he would subsequently publish diagrams in which he mapped these lunar relationships. Swedenborg’s search for an improved longitudinal scheme was enmeshed within an Enlightenment-era cultural climate of scientific inquiry and progress; he kept apace of the newest treatises, and feared, at times, his own solution would emerge too late.

Photographer Mimi Mollica’s project Moon City is simultaneously interested in selenic observation: gauzy images of the Moon drift alongside the glinting glass and steel of skyscrapers, at once conflicting with those monoliths of capitalistic 'progress' and finding elliptic, glowing visual resonances. The supposed material testimony of progress preoccupies Mollica, photographing through a telescope, as it preoccupied the young philosopher also looking down the lens of the same instrument. But the Moon, as archaic signifier, disrupts and conflicts our notions of past and future, progress and ambition—a quality Mollica’s photographs keenly foreground.

Join us at Swedenborg House as the photographer Mimi Mollica, writer Iain Sinclair and Director of the Swedenborg Society Stephen McNeilly seek to tread a lunar cartography in conversation. What bearing does the Moon have upon the city? How have we approached, and might we approach, the Moon as project? Photographic prints from Moon City will be on display exclusively for the evening in the Swedenborg House Gallery.

In addition, the first two publications by Hundtēontiġ Editions will be launched at the event: , a new poetry cycle written by Iain Sinclair in response to twelve visual and textual axioms unearthed in the Swedenborg House Archives, and by Stephen McNeilly.

MIMI MOLLICA is an award-winning photographer and editor, born in Palermo, Sicily in 1975. His photo essays deal with social issues and topics related to identity, environment, migration and macroscopic human transitions. His work has been published in The Guardian Weekend Magazine, The New York Times Lens blog, The Sunday Times Magazine, Granta and more, and he has exhibited his work at venues ranging from Somerset House, London to the European Parliament, Strasbourg.

IAIN SINCLAIR is considered one of London’s foremost contemporary chroniclers. His novels include Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Prize and the Encore Prize) and Dining on Stones (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize). For the Swedenborg Society he has written Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime (2011); with Brian Catling, Several Clouds Colliding (2012); and Swimming to Heaven: The Lost Rivers of London (2013). He has curated two exhibitions at Swedenborg House, Histories & Hauntings (2023) and Pariah Genius: John Deakin, The Psychobiography of a Photographer (2024).

STEPHEN MCNEILLY is a writer, anthologist, curator and museum director at Swedenborg House, London. He has written widely on Swedenborg and is also the founding editor of the Swedenborg Review, the Swedenborg Archive Series and the Journal of the Swedenborg Society. He has recently curated the exhibition Elective Affinities (2025-2026), involving over forty artists and writers, and, formerly, the two-phase exhibition Swedenborg’s Lusthus (2024).

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