Glenn Kaino's L’ènetènafionale is an animatronic sculpture of the pantomime character Pierrot and an anthropomorphized Moon. The piece looks kitschy and inconsequential at first, but then the Moon’s eye blinks and follows viewers around the room where it’s kept. Then, every few minutes (if the piece’s motion detectors sense more than three people watching), the sculpture comes to life as the Moon sings a recorded song. The music is the same as the socialist anthem “The Internationale,” but the words belong to a language called “lunar French” that was invented by Kaino himself and a group of linguists to speculate upon a new dialect that could plausibly develop on a lunar colony.

Meanwhile, the face of the mute, melancholy Pierrot is modeled on the face of Frantz Fanon, the 20th-century Afro-Caribbean philosopher and psychiatrist who wrote extensively about the effects of colonization on indigenous cultures.