The 2017 Visiting School to Chile aims at studying from architectural, urban, and territorial perspectives, a series of infrastructures that since the 1960s have been installed in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) because of its extraordinary strategic location in the South Pacific Ocean. These include satellite tracking equipment, seismology and GPS tools, and radio-nuclear detection instruments that came to define global technological projects in the island. In particular, the workshop will focus its attention in the Mataveri Airport which – being the remotest runway in the world – was paved in the 1960s by the United States for the installation of a (currently abandoned) strategic base and extended again by NASA in the 1980s to become emergency landing for space shuttles.
While enjoying the extraordinary natural and cultural history of the place, the workshop will explore its technological side, looking for its role within Cold War networks associated with the geopolitical concerns of the ‘space race.’ Complementing the high cultural value of the island, participants will be asked to document these built infrastructures and conceive projects that will engage with a different kind of archaeology. As a design problem, the workshop will reflect on the extension of Rapa Nui’s runway and the techno-scientific and ideological enlargement of the ‘space race,’ and its repercussions on the tourism industry. Through discussions around such elongated piece of reinforced concrete, we will enter into a plethora of themes seemingly remote from one another, but utterly interconnected, including the current relevance of these networks within projects for the remote monitoring of environments in connection with global warming and the impact of oceanic currents in the archaeological heritage, both above the ground and underwater.
This is an animated dialog which is useful for displaying information. The dialog window can be moved, resized and closed with the 'x' icon.
These items will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. Are you sure?
