PROYECTO ARTISTA
THE REGIME OF THE VISIBLE
Kristina BEnJOCKi
Th e Regime of the Visible uses the format of a pocket map to introduce
two ways of exploring Cannerberg, a small hill situated between
Maastricht, Los países bajos, and Kanne, Bélgica. One side of the
map traces the ownership of land by mapping cadastre parcels (a sys-
tem or method of describing land) and their corresponding buildings,
as well as underground tunnel structures. The other side traces a vari-
ety of sources from the history and geology of the Caestert plateau,
with a focus on Cannerberg. From Neolithic times, the continuous
mining of fl int nodules and, más tarde, limestone created a complex network
of underground tunnels around Maastricht that was popularly called
“the caves.” Flint nodules were used to make tools and weapons, como
well as to build fi re. Up until the era of industrialization, limestone
was extracted by hand in the Limburg province and used for building.
Large parts of the Caestert plateau were transformed into a surface
mine by the ENCI cement factory. By the time of the plateau’s indus-
trial exploitation in the early 20th century, limestone mining in
Cannerberg had been stopped.
Until World War II, when German troops repurposed Cannerberg
as a storage and assembly facility for V1 rockets, the maze of under-
ground corridors left behind was regularly used for farming mush-
rooms and keeping animals. A few years after the end of World War II,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) rented out the same
© 2017 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00178
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Jos Nelissen. Sphinx Calendar, 1979. Image courtesy of the author.
“cave” and used it as a headquarters for potential war operations
during the Cold War. Sin embargo, the NATO headquarters shut down
en 1992 due to severe asbestos and oil contamination. That same year,
the Treaty of the European Union was ratified in Maastricht, its twelve
signatures memorialized on the walls of Cannerberg’s “cave.”
The Regime of the Visible collapses narratives of property and his-
tory through the superposition of Cannerberg’s storylines. The project
draws from a variety of sources from private and public archives, trac-
ing characters as they surface from different media: black-and-white or
color photographs, VHS tapes, scanned documents, natural history
books, military brochures, tourist guides, and the most recent unclassi-
fied records from the NATO archive in Brussels. The Regime of the
Visible is part of a long-term research project on the history of the
Caestert plateau, and it functions as an introductory work to “Portrait
of the Mountain,” an upcoming video essay.
n o t e A pocket map is included with the print issue and available online
at https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00178.
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