In the Blind Distance
Architectures of Control and Resistance Symposium
Cornell University
Ithaca (US)
January 19, 2023
International Congress, Colonial and Postcolonial Landscapes
Gulbenkian Foundation
Lisbon (PT)
Session Chair: Samia Henni
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.