ABSTRACT
Investigating the former Panama Canal Zone as well as a variety of contemporary Free Trade Zones, this work provides points of entry into an spatial and material inquiry of the Zone. The research part builds upon the combination of critical cartography – examining landscapes and spatial products of various Zones – and theoretical considerations of the origins and workings of the Zone itself. Turning to cinema and literature for less descriptive and more generative ways of reading; to notions of otherness and the sublime for its materialisations; to paradigm and exception for its roots, this work aims to propose a way to operationalise the Zone and its landscapes for critical spatial practice.
Concluding from the research, this work presents the Office for Digital Oblivion – a spatial intervention that has grown to become a full-fledged hybrid, blurring boundaries between natural or cultural, ecological or anthropocentric and aiming to re-ground discourse on digital, material and territorial implications of information technologies. Through a series of interventions it aims to challenge narratives of de-territorialisation of communication infrastructures. Tracing systems through scales, it spatialises and thus problematises operational complexities which largely remain illegible.
The intervention consists of the Archive, an underground offline repository for fragile digital data; the Exchange Point which facilitates data/rock fluxes from excavation and data preservation; the Binary Gardens which revitalise abused landscapes while inscribing processes of data storage in vegetation; and the Space Cemetery that addresses celestial frontiers of data preservation. With that, it transgresses technocratic dogmas and puts forward new approaches to conceive of infrastructural systems; new ways of thinking, worlding and becoming-together in the Anthropocene.