Lands of Nike and Hercules
A Stage of Power Never Performed
Mixed Media Site Specific Installation,Headlansd Centre For the Arts,San Francisco, Summer Artist in Residency, 2025
“Lands of Nike and Hercules” emerges from my artistic research into the rich and layered history of a landscape of Headlands once shaped by military infrastructure and Cold War anxieties. Once a classified defense zone, this site carries the latent memory of the Cold War era: global tensions, constructed fears, and technological displays of strength. Missile launch pads, radar towers, and bunkers remain as silent witnesses to a war that was never fought — a carefully staged performance of power that never reached its climax. In my work, I reflect on this suspended state — on the contradictions of a defense system built for conflict that never came. I consider its echoes in our present moment, defined by environmental crisis, global instability, and ongoing threats of violence and erasure.
Lands of Nike and Hercules unfolds as a poetic and political inquiry through a series of archival collages, field recordings, video footage, and a site-specific installation. It is a meditation on absence and preparedness, a visual and sonic testimony to the afterlife of military ambition. Through this work, I trace the cold, abandoned choreography of missile sites — revealing the performative nature of deterrence and the spectral legacies of the Missile Age still inscribed in the land.
