Michelangelo Pivetta

Cephalopod Paranoia. The Archaeology of West Star

Keywords

Bunker, OTAN, archaeology, war, musealisation

In 1964, an industrious multitude, like a collective of Hymenoptera secretly busy in the belly of Mount Moscal near Verona, built one of the world’s largest underground fortified systems: West Star. The military architectural device, far from housing any extravagant weaponry, was a special container for electronic contraptions, part of a network that governed OTAN activities until the early 2000s. Technically, it stands as a gigantic machine designed for anti-atomic survival, conceived as an orbital station or a submarine, nothing more than an immense pressurised cockpit capable of vanquishing the forces of nature, this time unleashed by the insane human tendency towards destruction. The recovery and musealisation project will make West Star both container and content, museum of itself and shell of a narrative apparatus centred on the Cold War intended for young people: a transitive process, from the monument itself, West Star, to the narrative of its purpose, and vice versa.

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