Programme now announced for 1st Sept 2017 Bunker-fest at the RGS-IBG London Conference
May 21, 2017 2 Comments
The Royal Geographical Society have now released their timetable for the 2017 Annual Conference, and the three bunker sessions have been scheduled for Friday 1st September, running from 11.10 a.m. until 6.30 pm.
A copy of the full conference programme is downloadable here:
And conference registration (for the one day or the full conference) is here:
I’m delighted now to be able to present full details of our interdisciplinary bunker-fest, including each speaker’s abstract:
Session 1: The Future of the Bunker: new uses and meanings for the 20th century’s abandoned bunkers – chaired by Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University, UK (geographer)
Rethinking the Atlantic Wall: art, death and minerology
Xenia Vytuleva, Columbia University, USA (architectural historian)
The Atlantic Wall along the coast of Europe and Norway is in ruins. One of the most radical of Hitler’s infrastructure projects, known as Fuhrer Directive No 40, sought to transform natural coastal lines into the Fortress Europe. But today the wall lies in oblivion and solitude and its concrete structures are migrating along the borderlines, becoming part of rocks, dissolving back into minerals, metamorphosing into skeletons and the giant shells of reptiles. No longer regarded as functioning architectural bodies, no longer serving as a record of violent human activity, today fifteen hundred of these Nazi bunkers have become a new form of media, the abstract techno-basis of a new layer of coded information. This paper advances the idea of transplanting the discourse of the Atlantic Wall Bunkers onto the territory of photography, film and contemporary cultures at large, based on an on-going cross-disciplinary research – project – 1XUnknown. Launched in 2012, by the Italian urban artist Margherita Moscardini this multidisciplinary experiment forces us to re-think and re-calibrate the phenomenon within the broader trajectory of curatorial practices, material cultures, law, geography, conservation, chemistry and mineralogy. Balancing on the border of different media—engineering, politics, military-industrial production, statistics, science, forensic architecture the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall themselves embody numerous layers of meaning. However, it is this particular shift from the most traumatic archaeological remains to radical art that takes the discourse on the bunker as a material fact to a whole new extent.
The BMEW radomes: reimagining RAF Fylingdales as a military contemporary art complex
Michael Mulvihill, University of Newcastle, UK (artist)
Once when I was a small boy in the early 1980s I ran home as fast as I could from school to see if I could make it within the four-minute nuclear attack warning. Now, as an adult, I find myself in the uncanny position of Artist in Residence at RAF Fylingdales Ballistic Missile Early Warning Station (BMEW), the very place that would have signaled an impending nuclear attack. RAF Fylingdales is one of three BMEW Radar Stations situated around the North Pole that provide warning of possible nuclear missile attack to the US and UK. RAF Fylingdales is run in partnership with the USAF 21st Space Wing, which also provides tracking data on the 17,000 objects in orbit around the Earth, including satellites, space stations and the ever increasing “space junk.” Early last year RAF Fylingdales invited me to be Artist in Residence at their Visitor Centre and Archive. This presentation will show art works made in response to RAF Fylingdales’ archive, and survey the archive’s material culture, which charts the history of RAF Fylingdales from empty moor to operational BMEW Station. Amongst these materials are examples of creative activities taking place at RAF Fylingdales during the Cold War. This includes a section of RAF Fylingdales once iconic “golf ball” radomes, attributed to the mid-century modernist architect and utopian guru Buckminister Fuller, which I will use to situate a relationship between contemporaneity and timelessness with the materials of the silo, bunker and art studio.
Malleable concrete?: moving from contemporary memory to curated meaning at York Nuclear Bunker
Kevin Booth, English Heritage (UK) (heritage professional)
For those who lived through the Cold War the Royal Observer Corps headquarters in York, though in itself an unfamiliar space, acts as a catalyst to memory and association – a portal through which broader personal experiences are recalled and re-lived. Yet such powerful association is a finite resource and a gradual shift in our visitor profile sees a move from actual, visceral experience of the Cold War to an experience wholly interpreted, curated and consumed. At the end of our chapter in the In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker (2017) collection, Rachael Bowers and I noted that for younger adults the Cold War storyline is deeply embedded within their own popular culture references, design motifs and finishes echoed in style magazines. In this presentation I will reflect on how as curators we are endeavouring to manage, influence and benefit from this shift from contemporary memory to curated meaning. I will review a range of interventions within the bunker: as art gallery with subject themed content (Michael Mullvihill); augmented with a 10 piece chamber orchestra playing a bespoke composition; enlivened with the pounding beats of a techno duo as accompaniment to stitched together content from the Yorkshire Film Archive. The paper explores how English Heritage has worked with a variety of bunker narratives (some pre-given, and others that we are helping to create), playing with different mediums of translation, as our bunker looks for sustained meaning and relevance for 21st century audiences.
De-bunking the bunker: managing myth and misinformation in the bunkers beneath Dover Castle
Rowena Willard-Wright, English Heritage, UK (heritage professional)
By their very nature, government policies around the development and use of cold war bunkers are difficult to retrieve and navigate. This, alongside the fact that bunkers are often hidden “in plain sight” within our communities, has led to the development of false memories around their functions, with some deliberately planted. Most cold war academic interest is focused on military and foreign policy and architectural history. Which means that the mythology around the use of the bunker continues to grow and persist in the free dialogue of the Internet, without the benefit of academic challenge. I will be using Dover Castle tunnels and their cold war use (as Regional Seat of Government for the South East of England) as a case study to illustrate the difficulties of interpretation that the curator faces when explaining a bunker’s cold war use to the public, and how hard it is to be seen as an “honest broker” in this role. This is particularly clear in comparison to the same set of tunnels’ current public interpretation as a WWII frontline hospital, and operations rooms that played a key role in Dunkirk. We want to encourage imagination, because at its essence a cold war bunker was never “used” for its purpose, but also an authentic understanding of how government, in the past, has imagined itself into global nuclear war. Because it is in the subtlety of this that our recent history can reveal far more about our nature as a country and our form of government, than the safely entertaining history of wars from our more distant past.
Bunker Boredom: An ethnography of the experience of bunker labour, as an emergency planner
Becky Alexis-Martin, University of Southampton, UK (geographer)
Emergency planning in the UK has a dark heritage, with origins that stem from civil defence work aimed at preparedness for potential nuclear strikes during the Cold War. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall civil defence gradually diversified to include generic emergencies, reformulated under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Some nuclear bunkers have found new lives as emergency planning centres. This has entailed only modest change to their layout: filtration systems have been switched off and dust now gathers in cupboards of log books and pencils, but the occasional dark artefact or document survives in the back of a filing cabinet testifying to an earlier formulation of ‘thinking the unthinkable’. This paper presents an autoethnography of my experience of working in a repurposed nuclear bunker as an emergency planner at the start of the 2010s. I gradually became aware of its original function by conversation with senior service members. My presentation will chart this slow realisation, setting it alongside a depiction of the mundane labour of emergency planning – the multi-agency meetings, the acronyms, training exercises and coffee breaks – all played out within the repurposed bunker. My presentation will show that as a workplace, the bunker becomes boring and cognitive dissonance kicks in quickly, an aspect of bunker-dwelling that is often ignored.
Session 2 – The Bunker of the Future: materialising contemporary anxieties and desires in 21st century bunker building – chaired by Kathrine Sandys, Rose Bruford College, UK (scenographer)
What do we want from our bunkers? ruins, reinvention, anxiety and power
Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University, UK (geographer)
This presentation will provide a segue between the first session’s focus on the re-interpretation and re-purposing of the 20th century’s bunkers and the second session’s concern with the 21st century’s contemporary bunker-building, and its motivations. It will do so by exploring the relationship between the enduring cultural salience of the bunker and the intransigent materiality of its concrete instantiations. In short, it will ask “why is it that the bunker refuses to fade away?” Within this examination of the bunker’s continual reverberation I will explore the strengths and limits of Strömberg’s (2013) “funky bunker” hypothesis, consider the continued valence of bunker imagery across popular culture and its symbiotic relationship with contemporary bunker-building. I will also seek to build a conceptual linkage between recent scholarship on ‘concrete governmentality’ and the sociology of shelter (Deville, Guggenheim & Hrdličková 2014; Foster 2016; Shapiro & Bird-David 2016) and the ruin-focussed material-cultural disciplines that have tended to be the core of the nascent bunker studies reflected in the contributors to the 2014 RGS conference sessions on bunkers and the edited collection arising from it, Bennett (2017) In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker.
Every home a fortress: fatherhood and the family fallout Shelter in Cold War America
Tom Bishop, University of Sheffield, UK (historian)
By taking a historical look back to the nuclear crisis years of 1958 to 1961, this presentation will set the scene for subsequent exploration of contemporary bunker-mania. At the height of the ‘first’ Cold War millions of U.S. citizens were instructed by their federal government that the best chance of surviving a direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union resided in converting their backyards or basements into family fallout shelters. Directing their policies towards middle-class suburban America, civil defence policymakers asked citizens to realign their lives and family relationships in accordance with a new doctrine of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival, stating that middle-class suburban fathers had the capacity and resources to protect both themselves and their families from the worst possible manmade disaster. This paper offers the first historical study of fatherhood and the family fallout shelter during the early Cold War, examining the tension between the politics of ‘do-it-yourself’ survival and the lived reality. Rather than fostering one singular politicised vision of Cold War fatherhood, this thesis argues that fallout shelters brought to the surface a variety of interlinked visions of Cold War fatherhood, rooted in narratives of domesticity, militarism, and survivalism. Central to these narratives of masculinity was the private fallout shelter itself, a malleable Cold War space that inspired a new national discourse around notions of nationhood, domestic duty, and collective assumptions of what it meant to be a father in the nuclear age.
Bunker play: Possibility space and survival in the Fallout series
Emma Fraser, University of Manchester, UK (sociologist)
Bunkers (and bunker-like forms) have often been deployed in mainstream gaming franchises to support play in repetitive and restricted game spaces (Bennett). Influenced by the pop-culture image of the bunker as a site of post-catastrophe survival, games like Fallout depict hyper-technological and futuristic fallout shelters (or “vaults”) as key sites of gameplay – these have been a feature of the franchise since its inception (and are the sole setting in the 2015 iPad game Fallout Shelter, for example). Related games like the Borderlands series also deploy the “vault” architecture as a means to structure space within the game (especially in early iterations), but also as plausible spaces in which end-of-the-world survival narratives can develop. Through the Fallout series in particular – one of the biggest contemporary gaming franchises – this paper considers the way in which the space of the bunker is used in-game (structured, navigated, viewed), as well as the development of the contemporary bunker imaginary over time. Does the in-game bunker reveal a space of potential and possibility (Massumi), or are they more suggestive of Heterotopic spaces (Foucault), contested and inverted representations of real space? As the bunker imaginary and mechanic has evolved over the course of the Fallout series, what does the “vault” tell us about the bunker-form? Finally, do real-world practices of play and exploration in bunkers (Bennett) map onto virtual bunkers as spatial models for bunker-living?
Bugging out and bunkering down: on the sheltering tactics of survivalists and preppers in the 21st century
Michael Adams & Carrie Wilkinson, University of Wollongong, Australia (geographers)
Survivalist individuals and groups have become significantly more visible in recent years. A phenomenon emerging out of the USA in the late 1950s, survivalists, or ‘preppers’ as they have increasingly come to be known, anticipate and plan for a natural or man-made catastrophe that will bring about the total collapse of civil society, or the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI). A central feature of preparing for TEOTWAWKI is establishing a suitable place to weather out the immediate fallout when shit hits the fan (SHTF) or, depending on the nature of the catastrophe, to see out the end of days. This paper will examine the shelter (or ‘bunkering’) tactics and technologies of survivalists and preppers in the 21st century. To bring focus to the paper, we concentrate on the Australian context, with data collected from online, publicly available survivalist and prepper blogs, websites and forums. The bunker is a symbol of the intersection of Anthropocene and Apocalypse – discussions about the need for developing personal and community-wide resilience in regions experiencing and facing the effects of climate change resonate with survivalist concerns and practices.
Subterranean sanctuaries? secret underground spaces today.
Theo Kindynis, University of Roehampton, UK (criminologist)
Recent years have seen the ongoing and increasing appropriation and colonisation of selected subterranean spaces by economic, political and military elites. In 2015, London councils received over 4000 planning applications for so-called “mega-basement” developments: elaborate subterranean extensions, containing cinemas, bowling alleys, spas, wine cellars, tennis courts and gun rooms. The volume of such luxury bunkers – a growing trend amongst the city’s billionaire class – can exceed the housing space above the surface several times over, constituting a kind of ‘iceberg architecture’. Meanwhile, underground government and military facilities – many dating from the Second World and Cold Wars – remain quietly in use. Ageing bunker complexes are repurposed and retrofitted as secure “crisis management facilities”, cyber strike command centres and clandestine communications monitoring hubs. Taken together, such installations suggest a kind of subterranean ‘secret geography’; a shadowy subsurface archipelago of military and intelligence “black sites” (Paglen, 2010). Furthermore, there is an increasing convergence between, on the one hand, luxury basement residences, and on the other hand, the kinds of reinforced underground structures utilised by governments and militaries. The past decade has seen a surge in demand for so-called “panic rooms” amongst the super-rich, as well as the construction of full-scale bunkerised gated communities, touted as “luxury for the apocalypse”. This paper considers the implications of these contemporary forms of elite bunker-building.
Session 3 – In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: John Beck (University of Westminster, UK – literary and cultural theorist) in conversation with Luke Bennett, Kathrine Sandys and Kevin Booth – chaired by Nadia Bartolini, University of Exeter, UK (geographer)
In a day-long series of sessions at the 2014 RGS conference scholars from around the world met to debate the contemporary significance of the remains of the Cold War’s bunkers. Subsequently many of participants have contributed chapters to a collection edited by Luke Bennett, In the Ruins of the Cold War: Materiality, Affect and Meaning Making published by Rowman & Littlefield International in June 2017. This final session brings together Bennett and John Beck, one of his co-convenors from the 2014 RGS sessions, to discuss the approach taken by the book in examining contemporary engagements with these 20th century ruins. Bennett will be joined by two other contributors to the book, Kathrine Sandys (a scenographer) and Kevin Booth (curator of English Heritage’s York Nuclear Bunker). 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 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. Like the 2014 sessions, the book 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). This session will be chaired by Nadia Bartolini, a cultural geographer with a particular research interest in contemporary ruins who, in particular, has written of the necessity of blending an attentiveness to materiality, affect and meaning making in the interpretation of contemporary re-engagements with fascist bunkers in Italy (Bartolini 2015). Running this discussion as a session in its own right will give an opportunity for in-depth debate, both between the panel members and with encouraged audience participation.
Image credit: Dario Lasagni photograph of Margherita Moscardini’s 1xUnknown (2012) at Museo d’ Arte Contemoranea Roma: http://www.dariolasagni.com/index.php?id=7 & http://www.fondazione-vaf.it/premio/compendio/premio-artistico-2014/partecipanti/margherita-moscardini/
lukebennett13 
