The Future of the Bunker // The Bunker of the Future: three sessions proposed for RGS 2017
February 17, 2017 Leave a comment
UPDATE: these proposed sessions have now been adopted by the RGS and will form part of the RGS-IBG 2017 London conference. The bunker sessions described below will be running on Friday 1st September 2017. All of the speaker’s abstracts are now uploaded and available here:
https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/programme-now-announced-for-1st-sept-2017-bunker-fest-at-the-rgs-ibg-london-conference/
The rationale for the sessions is set out below and in an earlier post here:
I’ve today submitted the formal proposal for a three session bunker strand at this summer’s Royal Geographical Society annual conference (29 August – 1 September 2017, London). Once fully approved and adopted by the RGS I will publish all of the abstracts here. But in the meantime here’s the proposal summary and contribution titles:
Proposal summary
The last two decades have seen increasing public interest in, and engagements with, the abandoned remains of Second World War and Cold War era military and civil defence bunkers. Academics have been busy analysing the motives and forms of this engagement (Bennett 2011; Maus 2017) and also charting the origins and affective-material impacts of those 20th century waves of bunker-building mania (Bartolini 2015; Klinke 2015; Berger Ziauddin 2016). Such engagements and studies have tended to figure the bunker as a now-deactivated form – as a form of contemporary ruin – and as a phenomenon of the (albeit recent) past. This set of sessions seeks to supplement this scholarship by examining the bunkers’ futurity: through considering the bunker as an immanent contemporary and still-yet-to-come form of place. This concern to examine the bunkers’ futurity will be examined in two different, but complementary, ways: first by exploring the ways in which the 20th century’s bunkers are being reinterpreted and/or repurposed for the 21st century and secondly, by analysing what contemporary bunker-building looks like, and here exploring the anxieties and desires that drive it. As John Armitage (2015) has recently argued, Paul Virilio (1994) did not see bunkers as having a singular, fixed meaning or purpose and he instead saw early signs of their semantic evolution and repurposing. The assembled presentations will each consider this evolution, but will also acknowledge that the cultural foregrounding of denatured, “funky bunkers” (Strömberg 2013) is problematic both as regards how it presents (or erases) the bunker-form’s dark history or its ongoing contemporary replication. This unease will be debated in the final session, in which contributors to the recent edited collection In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Materiality, Affect and Meaning Making (Rowman & Littlefield International, Luke Bennett ed. 2017) will be interrogated by John Beck.
Session overview
Session 1: The Future of the Bunker: finding new uses and new meanings for the 20th century’s abandoned bunkers
1. Xenia Vytuleva, Columbia University (architectural historian) – Rethinking the Atlantic Wall: art, death and minerology.
2. Drew Mulholland, University of Glasgow (composer) – Listening to the concrete: re-composing the Atlantic Wall and Scotland’s Nuclear Bunker
3. Michael Mulvihill, University of Newcastle (artist) – The BMEW radomes: reimagining RAF Fylingdales as as military contemporary art complex
4. Kevin Booth, English Heritage (Senior Curator, North) – Re-stocking the bunker: curating creative re-uses at York Nuclear Bunker
5. Rowena Willard-Wright, English Heritage (Senior Curator, South East) – De-bunking the bunker: managing myth and misinformation in the bunkers beneath Dover Castle
Session 2: The Bunker of the Future: how we materialise our contemporary anxieties and desires in the new bunker-building of the 21st century
6. Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University (built environment) – What do we want from our bunkers? ruins, reinvention, anxiety and power.
7. Emma Fraser, University of Manchester (sociology) – Bunker play: Possibility space and survival in the Fallout series
8. Michael Adams & Carrie Wilkinson, University of Wollongong (geography) – Bugging out and bunkering down: on the sheltering tactics of survivalists and preppers in the 21st century
9. Theo Kindynis, University of Roehampton (criminology) – Subterranean sanctuaries? secret underground spaces today.
10. Session 1 and 2 Q&A and discussion.
Session 3: In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: a panel discussion
John Beck, University of Westminster (english) in conversation with Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University (built environment), Kevin Booth, English Heritage (curator) & Kathrine Sandys, Rose Bruford College (scenographer) about their contributions to the edited collection, In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: materiality, affect and meaning making (to be published July 2017, Rowman & Littlefield International).
Writing in 2011 Beck declared that the bunker was incapable of cultural recuperation, and that to attempt to do so might put us in thrall to the bunker and cause us to lose sight of its dark exceptionality. Beck also argued that bunkers engender an ambivalence which makes it very difficult to ascribe any stable meaning to them. In the Ruins is an attempt to explore Bennett’s differing interpretation that it is the bunker’s ability to foster multiple parallel, but internally coherent, forms of representation (i.e. multivalence) rather than its ambivalence that calls to be investigated. Accordingly the book explores the myriad ways, practices and logics by which these concrete structures are engaged by a wide spectrum of academics and others and given stable-seeming meanings. This ‘in conference with’ session will enable Beck to engage directly with Bennett about the book’s approach, and to debate with its authors whether the book avoids being in thrall to the bunker: and whether through its focus on multivalence (Bennett), artistic appropriation (Sandys) or heritage curation (Booth).
The panel discussion will be chaired by Nadia Bartolini, University of Exeter (geography).
Picture credit: WWII bunker at Cape May Point State Park, New Jersey USA from: http://www.futurenostalgia.org/index.php?showimage=218, some details here: http://www.artificialowl.net/2008/10/abandoned-cape-may-giant-concrete-ww2.html
lukebennett13 