In lieu of an image: sensing black holes at the Large Millimeter Telescope

Abstract (English)

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope—a virtual telescope the size of the Earth—issued the first images of a Black Hole, M87, located some 53,7 million light-years away. This paper attempts to ground the production of such images and the inhumane scales they gesture to in the mundane journeys of observers and workers of the Large Millimeter Telescope. Located on the top of the Sierra Negra in Puebla, México, the Large Millimeter Telescope dwells in a troubled region where lifestyles, knowledge, and hopes intersect, collide, or neighbour without ever meeting. Observing, then, is subjected to interruptions through which a site chosen for its technical feature becomes manifest as a place with its own lines of flight—land tenure regimes, forest fires, glacier disappearance, emigration, deforestation, political volatility, religious celebrations.

Just as Black holes figure an absolute limit to the possibility of knowledge, the telescope signals that the social and political fabrics shaping encounters between different worlds cannot always be mended. In an effort to partially explore the shadows and limits of encounters and connections, I take the chance to try and image a Mountain. Situating scientific production entails an effort to trace cosmic scales back to ordinary days and nights, to the peculiar rhythms and constraints of the every day, to wonders and hopes, to slow disappearance, to tragedies and incidents, to joy, sometimes, to violence, even. Going back and forth between ethnographic filmmaking and writing, this paper outlines an attempt to know in images and through images (Stevenson 2020) at the border of spacetime. 

As telescope promoters increasingly engage in the ethics and politics of « siting », our attention may shift to placing as belonging. This paper is an invitation to subvert the bureaucratic understanding of consent and the idiom of development, which flood plans for future telescope constructions and maintain a global geography of science saturated with domination while pretending to cast it away (Kreimer 2019, Lehuedé 2023). Instead, a more interesting premise would be to acknowledge that such infrastructure implies foundational violence (Benjamin [1921] 2021) tied to historical structures that cannot be erased. This slow ethnography attends to the complex affects surrounding a scientific quest and, without shedding the enchantment that astrophysics may produce, to moments when the desire for knowledge has to be interrupted, suspended, or even destitute (Agamben 2014).