the athena series

the Athena Series is made up of three video installations that indirectly follow the course of an US missile. On July 11th, 1970, an RTV Athena test missile was launched from Green River Launch Complex (Utah), a Cold War military sub-installation and was intended to land at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The missile overshot its target and landed in the desert of northern Mexico. It was carrying two containers of Cobalt-57, a radioactive element. This missile was part of the Athena Project which tested re-entry speeds and impact of missile re-entering the earth’s atmosphere during the Cold War. In this series of videos, the sites: the Zone of Silence in the Mapimi desert, White Sands Missile Range, and Green River Launch Complex, are visually investigated in each of the videos, while questions of silence, failure, and traces of history are considered.

the silence of the unsaid
2017
Single channel video
16:50


In July of 1970, the U.S. military launched an Athena missile from a base in Green River, Utah to test re-entry speeds and impact. The missile lost control, went about 400 miles off course, and crashed in a desert in northern Mexico, known locally as the Zone of Silence. It was carrying two containers of Cobalt-57, a radioactive element. In March of 2016, I traveled to this desert with questions about the silence surrounding the clean up of the crashed missile, as well as the myth that has since been building on this history. This video is the first in a series of three about the missile crash.

the silence of the unseen
2018
4-channel video
19:40

From the starting point of land always being the silent witness, this video connects the horizon as a point of unknown, the use of the American South West desert as a site of US missile testing and the birthplace of the atomic bomb, man’s potential for failure, and the crash of the 122nd Athena test missile. This is the second video in a series of three about the Athena missile crash.

Voice over: Adam Henry & Monroe Robertson

a sonorous silence
2019
3-channel video
14:35

This three-channel video that looks at the Green River Launch Complex, where the Athena project was housed, in its now ruinous state and contemplates the traces of history on a landscape. This is the final video in a series of three that traces the Athena missile crash.