Nadia Ettwein

« There’s a preacher man I call Dad who lives on the Moon.Some time ago, he chose to separate himself from his earth because he felt disconnected.He moved far away.I was angry.He fell sick.I have journeyed to the Moon and back, and I haven’t stopped.This is about my father, who sought peace in a place that separated him from me. »My Dad Lives on the Moon is a personal exploration of distance. The Moon becomes a metaphor for Orania—a self-declared Afrikaner town where my father chose to live. It speaks to emotional and ideological remoteness, but also to the surreal condition of post-apartheid whiteness: detached, insular, and uncertain of its place.My visits became a mirror for broader questions of belonging, whiteness, religion, nationalism, and the persistence of segregation—and the ways such ideologies continue to reproduce isolation under the guise of preservation.I am both insider and outsider: an insider through my relationship to my father and to this culture, yet an outsider in my uncertainty about what it means to be Afrikaner. »