RESEARCH
In the Blind Distance: French Nuclearization from a Ruin in Azores

Blind distance connotes the space between a radar and its target range; a gap in perception.

In April of 1964 France entered an agreement with the Portuguese dictatorship to erect a military installation in Azores. Now abandoned, the facility once performed a crucial role in the French nuclearization effort by observing the trajectory of ballistic missiles launched from the western coast of France.

Rearticulating a ruin in Azores to attend to this redacted space we call blind distance unfolds a continuum between the nuclear and the colonial, where the relentless pursuit of nuclearization became at once a vehicle for, and a product of, expanding frontiers of colonial violence—from the atolls of the South Pacific, to Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.

In collaboration with Tiago Patatas