“The black world is a phrase that emerged in the 1980s when the amount of spending in the American defence and intelligence budget reached historic highs. (…)
There is a materiality to this world so when we talk about secrecy, we are not just talking about secret documents, we are talking about an entire landscape and a geography of secret things. I started to research this world before there was Google Earth, Terraserver or other commercially available satellite imagery. Back then, if you wanted to look at aerial or satellite photographs, you would have to go to government archives. But the US geological archives are incomplete. There are photos that do not appear in those archives. When you go through them, you notice some are missing. You literally had blank spots on the map.
I thought it was an apt metaphor as blank spots allude to European and imperial histories: dark spaces inhabited by ‘dark’ people, places where fantasy and reality became intertwined in some very violent ways. To me, it seemed like this metaphor also worked for some of these military and intelligence geographies because they were also places that we did not have access to, and were marked by fantasies and extreme forms of what we may call informal violence.”
Photo: Trevor Paglen, ‘They Watch the Moon’, 2010.
Source: roryhyde.com
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