Bored to death? Here’s how to attend one (or both) of the book launch events for ‘In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker’ on 1st and 7th September 2017.

The next couple of weeks sees a flurry of promotional activity for my bunker book, In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker.

THE LONDON LAUNCH: 1 September 2017

Next Thursday (1 September 2017) is the ‘bunkerfest’ at the RGS, with three sessions in Skempton Building, Room 307:

11.10-12.50 The Future of the Bunker (1): new uses and meanings for the 20th century’s abandoned bunkers

14.40-16.20 The Future of the Bunker (2) : materialising contemporary anxieties and desires in 21st century bunker building

16.50-18.30 The Future of the Bunker (3): In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: John Beck in conversation with Luke Bennett, Kathrine Sandys and Kevin Booth.

Full abstracts for the sessions and their contributors are available on the RGS conference website, http://www.rgs.org (and in earlier blogs on this site).

THE SHEFFIELD & YORK LAUNCH: 7 September 2017

There are just a few free places left on the ‘guest-list’ for this afternoon seminar, early evening bunker tour and book launch. If interested please email me at:  l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk asap.

The event starts and ends in Sheffield (close to the railway station), and comprises:

1.30 – 3.15pm Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus: Cantor Building, Room 9130.

ASLE / LAND2 Conference Session – “To The Bunker: Three Views Of Cold War Landscapes”

A public session chaired by Luke Bennett, Sheffield Hallam University

Writing at the end of the 1970s, amidst resurgent US/Soviet nuclear brinksmanship, Thatcher’s reassertion of the authoritarian ‘Nuclear State’ (Jungk 1979) and the rebirth of the anti-nuclear movement across Europe, investigative journalist Peter Laurie declared that “the paranoia of power can be read in the concrete of the bunkers, the radio towers, the food stores and the dispersed centres of government” and concluded that this materialisation of both power and paranoia was now “written on the face of England” (1979: 9). This paranoia, and its sculpting of both discursive networks and concrete structures across the landscape has in recent years become a productive point of focus for artists and writers who have been seeking to examine the traumatic power of that era, and specifically to explore the links between the unsettling of minds and of the nuclear state’s colonisation of otherwise bucolic landscapes, by what landscape historian W.G. Hoskins, writing in 1954, had called “the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable’s and Gainsborough’s sky [and on the ground an equally contaminating] “high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment” (1985: 299). This cross-disciplinary field has also increasingly seen attempts made to trace and understand the lingering, after-effects of these Cold War framings through into the early 21st century and to investigate the motivations behind the current revalorisation of the now-abandoned brutal ruins of the cold war. This session will seek to show case three artists work in this field, alongside launching a collection of essays to which they and others have contributed that examines this psychic and material legacy of the cold war’s bunkers.

Three views of Cold War landscapes will comprise a showing of work by the following artists, with short accompanying presentations and Q&A opportunity:

• Louise K. Wilson (University of Leeds) The Eerie and the Banal: This sonic exploration reflects on artists’ and writers’ troubled fascination with Cold War bunkers. A strange interplay of fact and fiction frames this reflection into these anomalous and primal spaces. The role of the ‘eerie’ (explored in the writings of Robert Macfarlane and the late Mark Fisher) is invoked in a new sound work that melds memories of places visited, imagined and composited.
• Matthew Flintham (Kingston University) Torås Fort: A Speculative Study of War Architecture in the Landscape. Matthew will show his short film which in image and narration uses the techniques of speculative fiction to unsettle an account of a geologist’s compulsive analysis of the materialities of the remains of a Norwegian coastal battery, fusing the styles of the natural sciences and horror writing to do so. Flintham’s account reflects the ‘weird realism’ stylistics and concerns of contemporary writers (like De Landa 1997; Negarestani 2008; Bogost 2012; and Harman 2012) who each ascribe ominous, ‘hidden in plain sight’ posthuman mystery to seemingly dumb brute banal geological objects.
• Stephen Felmingham (Plymouth College of Art) Peripheral Artefacts: Drawing [out] the Cold War, Stephen will show and discuss his use of experimental drawing techniques to access the ‘hidden in plain sight’ uncanny qualities of now abandoned ROC Posts. In doing so he will show how his bunker-entering reconnaissance accessed his sublimated childhood trauma of growing up in East Anglia in the 1980s amidst USAF and RAF nuclear bases, pointing to the potency of material and spatial triggers to memory and feeling.

Plus a presentation by me to launch the book:

• Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam University) What do we want from our Bunkers? Ruins, Reinvention, Anxiety and Power. This presentation will explore 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 by the contributors to In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker.

At 3.15pm we will then depart by coach to attend a private viewing of English Heritage’s York Cold War Bunker plus a panel event there in which Ian Klinke (Political Geographer, University of Oxford) will interrogate a panel of contributors to the edited collection, In The Ruins of The Cold War Bunker. Due to space constraints within the bunker there will be two sittings of the panel session (alternating with the bunker tour). The panel will comprise:

• Louise K. Wilson / Stephen Felmingham (Artists) (alternating between presenter and chair)
• Luke Bennett (editor of In the Ruins)
• Arno Geesink (Architect)
• Kevin Booth (Senior curator, English Heritage)

The coach will then leave York bunker around 7.15pm, returning us to central Sheffield by 8.30pm (approx.)