What can an environment remember? How might a ruin in the Azores archipelago shed light on the destructive histories of the French nuclear projects in the Sahara desert and the Pacific ocean?

In 1964, a military observatory was erected in Flores island to survey the French missile testing across the Atlantic. The missiles surveyed through this lens were an inseparable container to the nuclear warheads deployed in the Saharan and Pacific destructive tests. On a continuum of signals—registering, sensing and transmitting—Flores’ observatory acted as more than a witness. This machinic ecology actively took part in the French nuclear project.

Across the media ecologies of the observatory, the networked relations of nuclear testing, and the botanical remnants of the French occupation in the Azorean island, this aesthetico-political experiment attempts to think juxtapositionally as a means to trace and interrogate the socio-environmental histories of the French military occupation in Flores.