ВНИМАНИE PROHIBITED AREA
[2021] 

ANA MOREIRA
JÉSSICA TEIXEIRA
MARIA COSTA
NUNO VENTURA

In The City, published in 1915, the sociologist Robert E. Frank pointed out the importance of taking the city as a laboratory for the analysis of human nature. The main characteristics of a city would also be the identity and behavior of a society and its political system; the city would reveal to society the true nature of its values, interests and tensions. For a long time, the most radical procedure for closing a city was not to make it walled, fortified or isolated, but to remove it from the map. Внимание Prohibited Area - An Atlas of Soviet Controlled Cities is a project about the Soviet ZATO, cities used as pieces of a political chessboard in the context of the Cold War. It is fascinating how ZATO are almost an allegory of how a city can be taken as an instrument of political administration. Putting ZATOs on a map and making them the object of an Atlas is a setback to the isolation, enclosure and prohibition of these areas.