“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.”
Last week Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group held the fourth, and final, session in our 2024 series exploring contemporary exploration. Having previously mulled over urban exploration, spelunking and climbing our attention turned to mountain biking.
This session was themed around the pre-launch of ‘Mountain Biking, Culture and Society’ (Routledge, 2024), an edited collection of essays edited by Jim Cherrington to be published on 15 February 2024, details here.
In each of our sessions an interdisciplinary selection of presenters have dissected the motives, methods and means of recreational exploration. The recording for this session is embedded below, and the previous sessions are available here.
When considering how to write-up this final session, I was first thinking of how mountain biking involves an interface – the bike – through which the exploring is experienced. At first glance this seemed like an important distinction, when compared to caving, climbing and urbex. But the distinction doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny – there is plenty of ‘gear’ desired and/or involved in any of these pursuits. The climber’s life depends upon an intimate, and essential, relationship with his climbing apparatus. Likewise the caver needs the very-best torch (ideally more than one). Meanwhile, few urban explorers would feel complete without a high-spec camera with which to capture (and thus express) their adventures. Therefore each exploration practice has its own vital interface through which the exploration becomes possible, and there are studies done (or to be done) on the person-equipment meld that is the contemporary explorer.
But it was in the mountain biking session that gear was (to me) most noticeable. In his introductory talk Jim Cherrington (Sheffield Hallam University) showed us how mountain biking enables people to be, by detailing the variety of identities and mobilities which can be constructed around a diverse set of levels and types of mountain biking engagement. In doing so he pointed intriguingly to the ambivalence of the ‘mountain’ within mountain biking. Thus for some mountain biking is an opportunity to commune with wilderness (i.e. to be experiencing the mountain as ‘wild nature’) whilst for others the mountain is appropriated as a gradient, enabling rapid downhill runs, in which the bike-body meld is tested to the edge of their unity. Meanwhile others bring tools with which to make new (mini) mountains, crafting and tending their humps with care and a sense of community. In short, Jim made a persuasive case for appreciating the multiplicity of practices and meaning-making that exists within any notion of mountain biking as a sub-culture. Jim also pointed to creaturely entwinements, to add alongside the machine-body meld of bike riding. Here, mountain bikers perceive climate change in the form of the increasingly likely presence of ticks clinging to their legs by the end of rides, due to global warming. So, there are often multiple bodies riding with a lone mountain biker!
This environmental sensibility was depended by Claire Nattrass (Leeds Beckett University / York St John University) who introduced us to her performative art methodology for studying the constant ‘bleed’ between riders bodies and the surrounding atmosphere. Centring upon air pollution as a form of ‘slow violence’ to riders (by enlisting laboratory analysis to detail the pollution assailing riders), Claire also showed how – incidentally – those chemical analyses also reveal contaminates emitting from the rider’s body itself, via perspiration and other means. The act of riding then becomes a constant exchange of trace matter within the rider/environment meld, and as the rider and the bike move through the environment they are enmeshed within it.
Jeff Warren (Quest University, Canada), drawing upon his work with colleague John Reid-Hresko, explored the role of ‘authenticity’ as a desired ethos within mountain biking, pointing out how a notion of ‘escaping to find yourself’ permeates mountain biking culture. That quest for authenticity is (in part) expressed through gear: either in having all that is needed to claim an authentic performative identity as a mountain biker, or via an ascetic renunciation of gear, striping things back to some form of purity (the analogy here being with ‘free climbing’) – but of course, to be a mountain biker you can’t renounce the bike itself (although during the event Jim mentione mountain bike unicycles which amount to a partial renunciation of the bike – in rejection of one of the bike’s wheels and the replacement of that with the authenticity of the greater balancing skill required to carry this off). I’m extending Jeff and John’s discussion here, in order to follow my rumination on the gearfulness of exploration.
Jacob Bustad (Towson University, USA) and Oliver Rick (Regis College, USA) presented their cultural analysis of urban mountain biking contests staged by Red Bull in the steep and winding urban passageways of Valparaiso in Chile. We watched GoPro footage of frantic downhill descents by expert riders, seeing how you don’t need a mountain in order to mountain bike, but you need plenty of gear to pull off such feats as these. That gear keeps these riders safe (to some degree) and enables the mediation of their individual experiences into a seemingly shared-experience in which we (the viewer) safe in the comfort of our armchairs (or other viewing positions). Here we can vicariously descend perilous routes at great speed, imbibing the ‘GoPro gaze’ afforded to us, courtesy of the event-sponsorship of an international energy drink manufacturer, co-opting a seemingly ‘DIY urbanism’ into global networks of consumption. Thus, here mountain biking’s gear is connecting us to the whole world.
“We can never expect to encounter culture ‘on the ground’, instead what we find are people whose lives take them on a journey through space and time in environments which seem to them to be full of significance, who use both words and material artefacts to get things done and to communicate with others, and who in their talk, endlessly spin metaphors so as to weave labyrinthine and ever-expanding networks of symbolic equivalence.”
Tim Ingold (1994) ‘Introduction to culture’ in Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life (Routledge, London 329–49): 330.
The above quote says it all really: the aim of the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s 2023 series, and its theme of ‘Exploring’, has been to show how enthusiastic explorers of seemingly ‘blank’ spaces choose to enchant those places by co-opting them into their meaning-making practices.
We started our journey through this theme back in July with In Ruins. Here our presenters introduced us to the lure (to them) of ruins, and how they seek to activate those broken places, and why. That session has been written up here. And the session recording is available here.
Our second session Going Underground, in October 2023, presented four speakers giving insight into the siren’s call that summons them into the dank dark depths of caves, sewers, catacombs and abandoned mines. Along the way we heard the infectious enthusiasm of mine explorer (and photographer) Denzil Watson, learned from Kevin Bingham about his new book Exploring the Natural Underground: A New Sociology of Caving (Routledge, 2023), followed anthropologist and cultural geographer Maria Perez on her journeys to study the cultures of caving practices across the karst landscapes of Venezuela, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and lastly we got an enticing glimpse of the motivations and frictions around the origins of sewer exploration in St Pauls / Minneapolis from Greg Brick. You can watch the session here:
Our third session, On the Rocks (November 2023) saw us hanging out online with rock climbers and quarry lurkers, examining their chosen relationships with the stone, mud and lichen to be found (and embraced) within natural and human-formed rockscapes. This session featured Victoria Lucas outlining her intimate lone engagement with an abandoned hard rock quarry, poet, climber and sound artist Mark Goodwin presented an enigmatic audio-visual performance engaging with the Dinorwig Quarries in North Wales, and Canadian Sociologist Jennifer Wigglesworth examined the rising critique of misogynist (and other exclusionary) route namings by first ascenders, drawing the link to colonialism. Finally, artists Sarah Bowden and Jean Boyd pressed into focus the glutinous mud of an operational blue lias clay extraction site in Gloucestershire, drawing out from the prosaic (and aesthetically null) vista relations working across vast spans of time and space. You can watch the session here:
We have our final session in the ‘Exploring’ theme on 7 December (7-9.30PM online). This time we will follow mountain bikers as they hurtle down mountain tracks. Once again we will seek to understand – by giving these enthusiasts time to speak – Why would anyone want to do that? How do they do it? And what are the implications of them doing it?’. You can find further details for that event here and register for places there.
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
Ernest Hemingway (2014 [1944]). “By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades”, Simon and Schuster, p.343
Since 2012 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has been convening interdisciplinary conversations about the study, experience, management and use of a diverse range of places. Our contributors include artists, architects, geographers, creative writers, managers and engineers. Since 2020 our playful and informal sessions have run online, and have been recorded for posterity here, ranging across topics such as haunting, covid, place making and homeliness.
In July, the SHU SPG’s first session in its 2023 series of online talks themed around contemporary ‘exploration’, investigated the motives, means and modes of exploration of modern ruins, as recorded and digested here. For our fourth event we will be continuing our exploration of exploration by hanging out with mountain bikers.
For ‘Exploring #4: On Your Bike’ our presenters will be:
Introduction: Mountain Biking, Culture and Society
Jim Cherrington (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
Via an innovative reading of mountain biking, this introductory presentation will outline the importance of the collection. Following some important definitions, the chapter introduces the reader to the notions of dominant, residual, and emergent structures of feeling, suggesting that these three modalities allow scholars and practitioners to move beyond static and essentialist readings of subculture. Subsequently, it suggests that the tensions and conflicts relating to mountain bike culture serve to highlight some of the most important issues of our catastrophic times, and that important lessons can be learned from studying these disagreements. Finally, the presentation briefly sketch the book’s themes, with new insights offered on the significance of mountain bike culture in relation to identity, bodies, ecology and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports.
Riding with Red Bull: Downhill MTB, digital Media, and DIY urbanism
Jacob Bustad and Oliver Rick (Towson University, USA)
This presentation examines the intersection of digital media and urban sport and leisure practices through a focus on point-of-view (POV) videos of downhill MTB racing, specifically the Cerro Abajo races in Valparaiso, Chile. In our analysis, we discuss how these videos function as part of the wider marketing and advertising efforts of GoPro and Red Bull (Kunz et al., 2016) and reflect transformations within the relationships between corporations, athletes, and fans in the contemporary sport industry, especially in regard to ‘niche’ sport cultures such as downhill MTB. We argue that these videos demonstrate a particular type of ‘GoPro gaze’ (Vannini & Stewart, 2017) that incorporates not only the representations of active bodies and the sights and sounds of branded global sport competitions, but also depends on the unique urban environments of the race route and emphasises the ways in which this form of branded content includes representations of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism (Finn, 2014).Air pollution as ‘slow violence’ during multi-day mountain bike trips
Clare Nattress (Leeds Beckett University/York St John University, UK)
Bikepacking consists of multi-day, self-sufficient, journeys by bike, that usually take place off-road, and is a phenomenon which has increased in popularity in the last 10 years. This presentation represents one of the first attempts to unpack contemporary multi-day mountain bike experiences, whilst identifying key themes in past and present scholarship. The presentation uncovers how mountain biking can be a performative art methodology to investigate, reveal, and disseminate the problem of air pollution. Multi-day mountain bike trips are cycled to collect data using a technological sensor, as well as employing artistic and embodied methods such as the concept of attunement. In doing so, the artist elucidates the ability to convey embodied experiences of dirty air through sensorial, affective, and more-than-cognitive registers. This research therefore calls attention to human and non-human bodies not only as victims of slow violence but also, conversely, as crucial sites of knowledge production
Escaping to Find Yourself: Portrayals of Authenticity in Mountain Biking Multimedia
Jeff Warren and John Reid-Hresko (Quest University, CAN)
How do the historical trajectories of ideas of authenticity, and the sociopolitical conditions that frame them, inform contemporary mountain biking multimedia, and what can this media tell us about mountain bikers and the broader contemporary mountain biking sportscape? In this presentation, we investigate these questions by examining two exemplars of mountain biking multimedia. We argue that these films do not simply reflect mountain biking experiences but are co-constitutive of experiences in ways that both solidify and perpetuate particular constellations of authenticity and also reproduce socioculturally-situated forms of inequality. In other words, mountain biking films do not just give us something to watch but give us ways to experience mountain biking. Throughout our analysis, we call for mountain bikers to critically rethink problematic ideals of authenticity and strive to understand one’s place within political and societal constructs and consider the ethical implications of our actions.
George Leigh Mallory, on why he wanted to climb Everest (New York Times, 18 March 1923)
Since 2012 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group has been convening interdisciplinary conversations about the study, experience, management and use of a diverse range of places. Our contributors include artists, architects, geographers, creative writers, managers and engineers. Since 2020 our playful and informal sessions have run online, and have been recorded for posterity here, ranging across topics such as haunting, covid, place making and homeliness.
In July, the first session in the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s 2023 series of online talks themed around contemporary ‘exploration’, focussed on the motives, means and modes of exploration of modern ruins, with a resulting write-up here. This Autumn we will be continuing our exploration of exploration with sessions on subterranean delving in caves, abandoned mines, and sewers; and on engagements with rock by climbers and quarry lurkers.
The events are free to attend, and open to all. Details of each event is set out below. To register for a place at either or both events please signup via our Eventcube store: SHU-SPG (eventcube.io).
Exploring #2: Going Underground (7-9.30PM, Thursday 26 October 2023)
Exploring the forgotten mines of England and Wales.
“Why do you explore those mines you go down? You must be mad!” one for my explorer friends asked me a few months ago. For once, I didn’t have an immediate answer, so I mulled it over. It started a few years ago after my friend showed me pictures of a small ganister mine he’d found in Wharncliffe Woods. It was fascinating. Another world. A lost world I had no awareness or knowledge of. So fascinated by it, I went out and explored it myself and immediately got the bug. Since then, I have explored the vast and cavernous slate mines of North Wales and the spatially-challenged lead mines of Derbyshire, amongst others. So returning to my friend’s question. When you are underground it is a place of absolute solitude and peace. I guess it’s a form of escapism. Then there’s the geology. And the social history. These mines were peoples’ livelihoods and sustained local communities over decades. And while all traces may have disappeared above ground, underground it’s a different story. In the mine it’s like a private museum. Then, as a photographer, there’s the not inconsiderable challenge of capturing the mines on camera. On next seeing my friend and offering these reasons, he fell silent for a moment. After a brief pause, he then replied: “OK, I’d not thought of it like that”.
Exploring the Natural Underground: A New Sociology of Caving
Kevin Bingham (Sociology & Leisure Studies, Barnsley College)
Challenging the old language of caving and the control and authority of ‘legislators’ over what it means to be an ‘authentic’ caver, Kevin Bingham’s new book views the natural underground as a site of leisure and anthropotechnics. What the book sets out to do from a sociological perspective is reveal the heterogeneity of the natural underground by unpacking some of the ways it can stimulate imaginations, senses and emotions. Viewing the act of caving as something special because it occurs between the rhythms and routines of the surface world and the obscurities of darkness, it is argued that a world can be found that offers richer experiences of living. The experiences are richer because the natural underground can become a place of ontological dislocation. To view caves in such a way is to realise that they lead into the naked convulsions of differends and the magical wonders of the sublime. The book concludes with the suggestion that caving, from a leisure perspective, is in the end all about the art of sublimation. That is to say, the natural underground is for some people about finding pleasure, pain and trauma simultaneously since it grants temporary liberation from the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity. Challenging the old language of caving and the control and authority of ‘legislators’ over what it means to be an ‘authentic’ caver, Kevin Bingham’s new book views the natural underground as a site of leisure and anthropotechnics. What the book sets out to do from a sociological perspective is reveal the heterogeneity of the natural underground by unpacking some of the ways it can stimulate imaginations, senses and emotions. Viewing the act of caving as something special because it occurs between the rhythms and routines of the surface world and the obscurities of darkness, it is argued that a world can be found that offers richer experiences of living. The experiences are richer because the natural underground can become a place of ontological dislocation. To view caves in such a way is to realise that they lead into the naked convulsions of differends and the magical wonders of the sublime. The book concludes with the suggestion that caving, from a leisure perspective, is in the end all about the art of sublimation. That is to say, the natural underground is for some people about finding pleasure, pain and trauma simultaneously since it grants temporary liberation from the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity.
From Caves to Karst and Back: Reassessing What It Means to Study the “Underground” in Venezuela, Cuba, and Puerto Rico
Maria Perez (Geography & Anthropology, West Virginia University)
This talk revisits two decades of experience accompanying, assisting, and learning from cave explorers both during expeditions to caves large and small and in other spaces where they gather, plan, process, and share what they learn in the field. The caves I have visited with cavers are located in the diverse karsts of Venezuela, Cuba, and, most recently, Puerto Rico. Karst refers to an environment formed by the dissolution of soluble carbonate rock (typically limestone). This process of dissolution forms not only caves, but also sinkholes, towers, and other geomorphological features typical of such processes. During these two decades I have closely followed a particular shift in emphasis from caves to caves-as-part-of-karst-systems. This shift has had major implications in terms not only of cave and karst science and exploration, but also conservation. In this talk, I offer examples of this shift from my research and I reflect on how it invites a reassessment of what we mean when we think of the “underground.” The first point is easy and far from novel, and that is that the term is too simplistic and often unhelpful to understand what’s actually going on (in our experiences) in the world. How easy we forget that the modern default thinking on the “underground” is extremely recent (in the context of human history), and in large part the result of engineering projects that have hardened and flattened the ground in ways inconceivable for most humans only a few centuries ago. My second and more ambitious point is to convince you of the power, purchase, and fruitful applications of a karst sensibility in our investigations. This sensibility, I argue, is most useful not only when challenging a whole slew of dichotomies (i.e., under vs over ground, land vs sea, soil vs water, past vs present, living vs dying, nature vs culture, etc.), but also for inspiring more accurate frameworks to make sense of what makes the appeal of the “underground” so powerful in the first place.
Situationism in the Sewers? Urban Caving versus Urban Exploration
Greg Brick, (Geology, University of Minnesota)
I began exploring natural and artificial caves in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area of the state of Minnesota, USA, in 1988, culminating in my 2009 book, SUBTERRANEAN TWIN CITIES. I made early use of the phrase “urban caving” to describe this activity, in a 1992 article in the NSS NEWS. I took it as a point of pride never to go underground without investigating some geological or hydrological enigma. With the advent of urbex (urban exploration) websites in the late 1990s, however, the local caves and tunnels were suddenly flooded with a new generation of urban explorers. Because of ample subterranean resources in these cities, much local urbex focused on infrastructural exploration, rather than the usual aboveground industrial “ruins.” Latter-day urbex has been explained by some researchers using postmodernist theory. The very term “exploration,” however, is fraught with colonial baggage. It’s even questionable whether urbex fits the trendy “transgressive” label. Urbex is a highly gendered practice, most participants being young white males, whose online self-promotion and pursuit of “spectacle” (now with YouTube monetization!) were readily assimilated by consumer capitalism. Situationism, on the other hand, a French movement often cited as a forerunner of urbex, could prove fatal to someone underground. Guy Debord himself would soon be lost in the Paris catacombs or sewers if he had “drifted” randomly through the confusing labyrinths. I argue that much scholarship on urbex by cultural geographers applies more readily to aboveground urbex. We should make this distinction when assessing the academic literature.
Exploring #3: On the Rocks (7-9.30PM, Thursday 16 November 2023)
Quarry Woman: Pixelated Extraction as Material Reckoning
Victoria Lucas (artist)
Victoria Lucas is an artist based in Sheffield, UK. She is one third of the art collective Heavy Water, 0.5 Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire and part-time PhD Candidate in the Art, Design and Media Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. Recent exhibitions include PostNatures, Graves Gallery, Sheffield (2023); Aggregate, Freelands Foundation, London (2022) and Heavy Water at Site Gallery, Sheffield (2021). Her artistic research lingers at the edges of materiality and culture, as an interrogation of how the technological dissolution of boundaries might reorientate female subjectivity in the context of an ecological crisis. Lucas uses technology specifically to deconstruct and reconstitute post-industrial sites as artworks, as a method of exploring the web of interrelations between the material, biological, cultural and historical subjects encountered. This research is realised through the production and distribution of artworks incorporating video, photography, storytelling, performance and sculpture. This ecological approach to artistic practice is contextualised by the post-industrial landscapes of Northern England. In the craggy rock of post industry and at the conceptual edges of human-centred culture, the skins of ontological categorisation are permeated through a collaborative, subversive process of material reckoning. Technology becomes a co-conspirator; nature a mentor. Through lingering with nature in the aftermath of material extraction, Lucas visualises new aggregates that de-centre the human subject as part of a post-humanist entanglement of matter.
The Tale of The Journey to The Dead Engine in The Shed at The Bottom of Heaven’s Walls: being a poetic voyage into the depths of Dinorwig Quarries
Mark Goodwin (poet and climber)
The Tale of The Journey is a sound-enhanced version of a long poem that remembers a collaborative exploration made by a poet, photographer and climber. The original text version of the poem is published in Mark Goodwin’s Rock as Gloss (Longbarrow Press, 2019). This sound-enhanced version is a mix of on location field-recordings, including Mark performing the poem amongst the slate slabs & rubble of Dinorwig Quarries in North Wales, in January 2018. In January 2009 poet Mark Goodwin, photographer Nikki Clayton and internationally renowned rock-climber Johnny Dawes shared a trip down into Dinorwig Quarries. These vast holes of haunting slate consist of forty galleries, hundreds of feet deep, extending over an area of seven hundred acres. They are a climbers’ playground … and the many tunnels, inclines, winding-houses and vertiginous rusting ladders offer exhilarating and bewitching opportunity for exploration. However, the slate-ancient sadness and pain this place contains is sharp ¬– for these mountainside holes were where many Welsh people struggled and suffered to extract slate … this place killed people. Since his teens (in the 1980s) Mark has had a go at making poems from this ruptured ground … and has also given time to audio-recording its rich sound-sculptural atmosphere … dripping water, cronking ravens, and sliding slate-scree. The Tale of The Journey is one of his more successful struggles with this intricately layered place of deep rift and play.
“Whose consent do you have to name this in this way?”: Gender and the politics of land in outdoor rock climbing route names.
Jennifer Wigglesworth (Outdoor Recreation & Tourism Management, University of Northern British Columbia)
In outdoor rock climbing, the ‘first’ person who successfully ascends and sets up a route – the first ascensionist – gets to choose a name for it. Some first ascensionists use misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist names for routes, and these naming practices extend across North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Climb the Gap, 2022). This issue is a complex one – the first ascent (FA) tradition is made possible by settler colonialism – with a long history (Loeffler, 1996). Discriminatory route names were rarely challenged because of the widely accepted tradition of FA naming rights; however, in the summer of 2020, the advocacy around renaming routes gained momentum alongside transnational calls for racial justice. In this presentation, I use an analysis informed by feminism, anti-racism, and settler colonialism to discuss the implications of naming practices within a shifting cultural terrain. I revisit data I collected in 2018 that examined climbers’ reactions to misogynistic route names, and I document significant route name changes that took place in Canada and the United States since the summer of 2020. I argue that the politics of naming routes cannot be divorced from a settler-colonial logic that has long used (re)naming land as a strategy for nation-building. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the successful renaming of discriminatory routes is one way to support different ways of exploring rock faces. It is my hope that this talk contributes to a larger discussion about the intersection of gendered and colonial power and how they shape landscapes and recreation practices.
The Quarry: conversations on mobile geologies
Sarah Bowden and Jean Boyd (Art & Design, University of Gloucestershire)
A local quarry here in Gloucestershire has been of interest to us, as a site for investigative field trips and the ongoing critical reflections these provoke. The quarry is both an extraction site for blue lias clay and gravel, sedimented over immense periods of geologic time, and a landfill site, sedimenting new forms of material strata. Through conversation and images we will offer a call-and-response dialogue with the quarry and each other, to consider the contrasts that the site encompasses: of geologic and human histories and their timescales. We will move between perspectives; analytic, interpretive and speculative. Our points of focus are the following: Sarah questions extraction and circulation as economic dynamics maintaining flows of matter, capital and fossil debt between past and future. She will consider how mapping, surveying and image-making enable extractive apprehensions of landscape. Jean will discuss the site as an intercalation of storied matter; a mobile geology of deposition and distribution, construction and ruin. The quarry is lively and has stories to tell.
“I am interested in what library scientists call the “information-seeking behaviours” of artists—how and why arts practitioners pursue research, often in the form of primary source archives, objects, and interviews, but also from sources as diverse as statistical records, song lyrics, scientific data, archaeological reports, amateur film, architectural plans, found documents, unpublished recordings, and so on. While not necessarily new, this desire to examine, extract, and enfold “real world” information into artistic practice is a phenomenon that, in my twenty years as an artist, curator, art historian, and now MFA director, I have seen intensify significantly in recent years.”
We were introduced to Rebecca Duclos’ notion of ‘compulsive browsing’ by Jane Wildgoose during her joint presentation with Harry Willis Fleming at Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place Group’s recent ‘In Ruins’ event, the first in our ‘Exploring’ season.
Our season of four events seeks to investigate the motivations and methods of a range of enthusiastic explorers of otherwise mute portions of the environment: broken buildings, underground spaces, rock faces and bumpy trails. The connecting thread is that in each place something is being sought there by the explorer – a desired mix of visceral experience, a curation of an event and some sense of attaining a truthful and/or creative discovery through material engagement with a place and its fragments. In short, a pursuit of a harvest of something needed from the chosen place, via a ‘compulsive browsing’.
The ‘Exploring’ series sessions will enquire into that meaning making – that animation (or re-animation) of the mundane.
For our first session we focussed on engagements with ruins. Enthusiastic photographer and urban explorer Denzil Watson guided us through the rooftops, culverts, passages and broken shells of Sheffield’s abandoned places. Denzil’s rich and engrossing account showed his sustained engagement with the city’s ruins over the past four decades. In his images the recent, the eternal-seeming and the now-gone all intermingled, summoning both a local-ness (for those in the audience familiar with this city) and a universal-ness, for those who were not.
Next, Portuguese architect, academic and curator Ines Moreira chronicled her encounters with modern ruins in both her home country and in Eastern Europe. In doing so the tone of the event started to change. Ines questioned the desirability of the relics of war, totalitarianism and calamity that her projects had foregrounded. Variously she showed her ruin-sites to be implicated in networks of dark purpose, to be semantically unstable and/or to be on-the-brink-of-forgetting-and-erasure. A sense of ruins’ fractured sense of loss, meaning and futurity was brought into the arena. Ines confessed to having come to feel exhausted through her ruin gazing.
These revelation of the emotional labour entwined in the prolonged act of gazing upon others’ (and/or common-heritage) ruins set the stage nicely for Harry Willis Fleming and Jane Wildgoose’s joint presentation on the entropic interaction of their two arts practices, and of the emotional labour of more personalised ruin gazing. Harry articulated a recovery-drive of sorts, related to his attempts to restore (virtually) his ancestral home, North Stoneham House. Jane introduced her attempt to recreate a Cabinet of Curiosities. Each them problematised the compulsive browsing sitting at the heart of their each working with ruined remainder. Harry moved on the explain his Bervie Brow Research Station – created in the abandoned ruins of an Aberdeenshire nuclear bunker. Meanwhile Jane chronicled how she had increasingly come to question the ethical acceptability of the fragments assembled in her ‘Wildgoose Memorial Library’, leading to the decision taken to inter her artefacts in the bunker’s subterranean strongroom. In effect to sequester them; to sever them from the accessible world of now, to further restrict their meaning and integrity. In short to ruin them, but at the same time to stall their entropy.
“Seemingly sleepy, old fashioned things, defaced houses, closed-down factories, the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forth… like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language”
De Certeau & Giard (1998) ‘Ghosts in the City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2, Minnesota University Press, p. 133.
The urban fabric is constantly changing. New buildings appear and for a while are the focus of attention and intensive use. Meanwhile, old buildings fall into disuse and thereafter decay. Many old buildings are replaced before they reach the status of ruins. Some ruins sit in the urban fabric only for a short – transitional – period, whilst others linger for longer. But only certain ruins become the focus of attention; most remain unnoticed or unremarked.
My research over the last twelve years has sought to examine the practices by which certain abandoned, dilapidated structures are made the subject of meaning-making: how they come to be noticed as ruins.
My research’s focus has largely been upon the physical remnants of defence networks, and in particular upon military (or civil defence) concrete bunkers. Mostly this research has been carried out in the UK, and has examined the material and semantic fates of various Cold War-era bunkers.
I’ve considered how seemingly nondescript concrete structures have become the chosen object of considerable fascination for some, and how – within certain communities of enthusiasts – images, exploratory accounts, fragments of narrative, histories and specifications have become valorised and circulated, almost as a currency.
But – as noted above – only some ruins come to attract this attention, and most buildings fall out of use unremarked. In my contribution to the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s online session ‘In Ruins’ on 6th July 2023 (7-9pm):
I’ll be reflecting on the (semi) randomness of why some places get valorised, some become objects of concern (generally ruins are seen as unsettling to the good order of the urban environment and its populace), but others pass unremarked. Certainly one driver for valorisation is nostalgia – whereby particular ruins (as representative of culturally precious events or former activities) become the cherished objects of cultural (and material) desire and/or preservation.
But there is – of course – another route by which a ruin can arise through nostalgia. Here the spur is a direct connection by an individual to a site now found in ruin. This can be a particularly potent ruin-attachment, but it struggles to be communal or to transcend the viewer’s own direct knowledge.
Let me explain with an illustration. I used to be an office worker. I started work in 1990. Whilst in the final year of my degree I watched the office building that I was shortly to start working in being erected (as an extension to an Edwardian terrace of ‘chambers’-type buildings). On my walk to Uni I could look step by step at the new building’s steel frame of the new office as it was assembled. Over a sequence of weeks I saw the building take shape, becoming complete and enclosed. A few months later I started working in it. As a trainee I rotated around various departments and worked in various portions of the building: I fully inhabited it. It was a site of highs and lows; great days and horrible days, a sequence of events played out in the rooms formed solidly by the enclosing of that steel frame.
Finding myself many years later, back at that site, the now-abandoned building functioned for me like an giant advent calendar. Looking at each window summoned a memory of a particular interaction, emotion, learning-step (or mis-step). Just as Tim Edensor (2005) has noted (in relation to nostalgic impulses related to encounters with industrial ruins): “one conception of walking around a ruin might be to construe it as a walk through memory, a walk which produces a compulsion to narrate that which is remembered” (160).
But, coming upon the ruins of that building – all shuttered, graffitied and overgrown – also jolted sense of my past living on in some physical sense beyond my having eventually moved on to live and work elsewhere. It felt like I had turned my back and entropy had taken over. Not in the sense that I personalise this – my departure didn’t cause this building to fall into decay – but in the sense of a realisation that the world had carried on there without me, in way different to what I had been expecting: it has proceeded as change rather than stasis. It emphasised to me that going back in time is never the same as going back in space.
The prominent city-centre location of this building and (it appears from local newspaper reports) the delay between my former employer having vacated this building and permission being granted for erection at this site of (yet another) student apartment block, suggested to me that this modern ruin might make it into the ‘eyesore’ (or something-needs-to-be-done-about-this) category of noticed ruin.
But soon after that encounter, I came across the office-ruins of the building I had moved on into (in a different city) in 2000. This ruin was more in the unremarkable camp – it posed no disordering threat to its locality, but peering inside it was a corruption of the place that I have known and worked within. That experience also emphasised the rupture between travel in time and travel in space. The view that confronted me is the opening photograph above. When I had worked there, the floor had always felt unquestionably solid and sturdy, and the ceiling had drawn no attention to itself. Desks, phones, computers, suits, voices would have bounced around the now voided-space.
No-one will rhapsodise over the death of an office. It’s not a species of property that has heritage or other communally-nostalgic value. Enthusiastic communities of office-ruin aficionados are unlikely to proliferate online.
But ruins can be personal too.
Reference: Edensor, Tim (2005) Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality(Berg: Oxford)
“…whenever [Mozhayev] forgets who he is, and what he should do next in life, he gets on a bus and rides to the old familiar bus stop where he grew up and suddenly everything makes sense again”.
Peter Pomerantsev (2017) Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Faber & Faber: London
In his book chronicling the strange, ‘through-the-looking-glass’, world of modern Moscow, Pomerantsev presents a chapter chronicling the hectic and disorienting pace and nature of that city’s recent ‘regeneration’, wherein:
“The city changes so fast that you lose all sense of reality, you can’t recognise the streets. You look for a place where you went to eat a week ago, and before your eyes the whole block is being demolished.”
Set against this disorientation, Pomerantsev introduces Alexander Mozhayev, an urban explorer cum psychogeographer cum rescue archaeologist. Mozhayev leads walking tours in search of vanished and vanishing buildings, who declares there to his audience:
“We’re here to say a wake, to this building, to old Moscow, all these buildings are set to be destroyed.”
In Pomerantsev’s portrayal at least, Mozhayev is driven by a strong sense of a need to find and preserve the past, in order to hold his own sense of individual identity together. For Mozhayev:
“When my parents died, I could remember them through the building that we lived in. Buildings aren’t so much about recollecting time as about the victory over time.”
This strong sense of the power of place to ground an individual’s identity, and in particular of the role of the local and familiar material environment and its arrangement as a cherished store of personal memory and meaning struck me as running deeply through the five presentations given in our recent two ‘Changing Places’ online events, for which the session recordings are now provided here.
In Changing Places #1: Changing Places & Changing Identities (held on 24 March 2022) Nantia Koulidou (Art & Design, SHU) explored her experience of international migration through the design of electronically activated jewellery that could be programmed to comfort the wearer through release of visual and/or audio mementos when triggered by the environmental effects (e.g. altitude) of travelling between home countries and new horizons. This brought a sense of the way in which both jewellery and mobile electronic devices are now intimate companions in our life-journeys, props by which we remember, below and move-on.
Then Jess Scott (Social Science, SHU) outlined her ongoing research into how younger residents of care homes acclimatise to their new dwelling places, and make sense of their past, present and future by reference to the physical arrangement of their new surroundings. Jess’ concern is to better understand ow such transitions occur, in order to find ways in which the managing of that adjustment can be made to be the most positive experience possible.
Finally Joanna Dobson (SHU Humanities) presented an intimate account, through memoir and wider reflection, of a very formative family event, showing how the experience and recollection of childhood home and holiday locations was framed for her and her family members by that event and its perceived incorporation into the very form of the local landscape. [Joanna’s presentation was not recorded]
Meanwhile, in Changing Places #2: Change and the Material Fate of Place,Joanne Lee (Art & Design, SHU) and Rosemary Shirley (Museum Studies, University of Leicester) outlined the five key areas of inquiry that they are developing for their intended project to explore ‘the local’ (and it’s quality of ‘local-ness’) led by development of creative methods for the investigation of place. Growing out of their own experience of dwelling within narrowed ranges of existence during the covid years, their work seeks to find ways to characterise and explore the multiple locals inherent in any seeming place, and of the mundane (but fundamental) ways by which such senses of the local are made and transacted. In discussion it was noted that teasing out how ‘community’ and ‘locality’ differ (but potentially overlap) could be key, as will showing how qualitative (and narrative) based ‘creative’ techniques now used by marketeers and ‘place branding’ consultants can be distinguished from the more holistic (and less instrumentalist) aims of their project.
Then film-maker Esther Johnson (Media, SHU) outlined her multi-modal attempts to preserve both the form and symbol of Hull’s Co-Op department store’s ‘three ships’ mural. Esther’s project, and its collaborations with Hull residents and contemporary heritage campaigners, brought us back round to the question of where the urge to preserve the cherished built environment comes from, and how it reflects both individual and collective identity and (perhaps) a positive dimension to nostalgia, now that modernism’s faith in the-future-as-progress has itself become something of the past. It also flagged how, if (contrary to Mozhayev’s desires) buildings themselves are not good bets for “victory over time”, then perhaps a more durable victory (and aspiration to memory-survival) can be achieved by multiplying and disseminating the most iconic symbolic representations of the building’s former identity-power. Through Esther’s efforts the ‘locals’ of Hull now connect as a community of collective memory, carrying the three-ships mural emblazoned on T-shirts and other printed, portable media even in the face of the Hull Co-Op building’s imminent demolition.
Image Credit: Esther Johnson, mural on former Hull Co-Op department store
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve today submitted a proposal to the RGS for a 10 paper session investigating vacancy at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference, 1 – 4 Sept in London.
Under the title What’s behind the fence? Exploring dead land and empty buildings the session will seek to move beyond contemporary cultural geographies of wastelands and ruin-sites which tend to celebrate vacant spaces as a break from the ordering impulses of everyday normativities (Edensor 2005; DeSilvey & Edensor 2012). Keen to chronicle the ways in which wider human and more-than-human agencies are enabled in such sites, only incidental attention is ever given in these works to the continuation of a quiet custodianship of these sites by those who own, or who otherwise consider themselves responsible for them. Yet in a fleeting glimpse of a passing security guard patrol, coming across a patched perimeter fence or in the flickering of lighting served by a still-active electrical power supply, seemingly abandoned sites reveal themselves to be not quite as abandoned as they at first seemed. This conference session will open-up an attentiveness to the subtle, ongoing ordering and management of such sites, and whether by their owners or by opportunistic appropriators.
Taking a life-cycle approach, presenters will explore the stories and structures that have caused abandonment at both remote sites and those within the heart of otherwise active and occupied urban centres. They will tease out the logics of opportunistic appropriators (urban explorers, rough sleepers, ravers, artists, scrappers and scavengers), their notions of territoriality and of their own emergent normative codings devised for the shared use of abandoned places. The role of professional cultures and logics of urban set-aside and vacant site management will also be explored. In each case these readings of the motives, modes and meanings of vacancy will be attentive to the wider ecologies in which these sites and their actors are imbricated and of the important role of (positive or negative) place attachment in determining the speed at which a site is withdrawn from vacancy, or how it is maintained purposively in that state.
If accepted into the event programme the session will feature contributions by scholars from Switzerland, France, Russia, Ireland and the UK that will range across the following:
Investigating the lives of dead places
Polphail: Scotland’s ghost village left abandoned in the wake of structural changes in the North Sea oil industry
Vorkuta: 16 Arctic settlements built around now-defunct coal mines
Dublin’s ghost estates and their ambiguous place in Dublin’s housing crisis
Halle-Neustadt’s stubbornly enduring highrises, in a city that is trying to shrink
Methods of investigating vacancy
How far can heritage archives shed light on prosaic phases of inactivity?
Do we pay sufficient attention to what owners and developers think and do around vacancy?
Who are the occupants of empty places?
Squatters, pop-ups and the interplay of DIY and institutionalised usage of wasteland sites in Paris and Glasgow
Urban explorers motivations in accessing the Paris catacombs
Inhabitation of a muslim graveyard in Tangier by Cameroonian migrants
Tensions between guards, recreational trespassers, artists and institutional owners in the management of a Scottish modernist ruin.
I’ll post full abstracts here once the session has been adopted by the RGS.
“the wood-ant ‘colony’ described here – although superficially looking like a functioning colony with workers teeming on the surface of the mound – is rather an example of survival of a large amount of workers trapped within a hostile environment in total darkness, with constantly low temperatures and no ample supply of food. The continued survival of the ‘colony’ through the years is dependent on new workers falling in through the ventilation pipe [of this abandoned Cold War bunker]. The supplement of workers more than compensates for the mortality rate of workers such that through the years the bunker workforce has grown to the level of big, mature natural colonies.”
Czechowski W., Rutkowski T., Stephan W., Vepsäläinen K., (2016) ‘Living beyond the limits of survival: wood ants trapped in a gigantic pitfall’. Journal of Hymenoptera Research, 51, 227-239 at 237.
As previewed in last month’s blog post, all of the contributions to my guest-edited special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies are now available on the journal’s website [here]. The five papers (plus my extended editorial essay, portions of which were presented in last month’s blog post, and further extracts below) are all concerned with the after-life of Cold War bunkers, and particularly with the ways in which these obstinate places refuse to disappear, either from the space that they inhabit or from the cultural milieu that they still haunt. Like an automatic beacon faithfully continuing to transmit long after the ship has been abandoned, or in the survival instinct of a colony of ‘lost’ ants, the modes and means of abandoned bunkers endurance (and of life and meaning-making playing out within them) is subjected to analysis by the contributing – multidisciplinary – authors, with each interpreting this endurance as a form of ongoing cultural production.
Still alive: ongoing cultural production in the abandoned bunker
The Journal of War and Culture Studies’ aims include promoting exploration of the relationship between war and culture during conflict and in its aftermath, and examining the cultural production and circulation of both symbols and artefacts of conflict. Bunkers are very potent and enduring symbols and artefacts of conflict, which are deeply embedded in contemporary culture (Bennett 2011). To draw out this embeddedness, this special issue takes a very broad view of the bunker’s cultural production. As Raymond Williams (1983, 87-93) notes ‘culture’ is not a settled term. The contributors to this issue tend towards using the term in its anthropological sense – with cultural production thus here being regarded as the processes by which social groups produce shared meaning about abandoned bunkers, and whether that arises within small groups of enthusiastic bunker preservationists or across wider society via popular culture. Therefore, the narrow, elitist, sense of ‘culture’ promoted by Matthew Arnold (1960) as the production only of the fine arts is elided.
Additionally, the expression ‘cultural production’ is used here in a way intended to emphasise that that the generation, modification and circulation of cultural symbols and artefacts is always ongoing. Meanings evolve – therefore the cultural production of the bunker is not a one off, originating event. The meanings and uses of these places evolve over time, and in response to a variety of broadly societal trends (e.g. how bunkers are portrayed in popular fiction) and in how individual actors actively engage in a process of appropriation within the bunker, each projecting and inferring upon the bunker in accordance with the needs of their own purposes and practices. Thus Sean Kinnear portrays the variety of actors, motives, and resulting re-use schemes, brought about recently in four Scottish bunker sites. Meanwhile Phil Kokoszka and I investigate the medley of stakeholders and their entangled cultural logics at play in the stilted after-life of the former cruise missile bunkers at Greenham Common. Furthermore, the articles by Louise K. Wilson, and Becky Alexis-Martin, Michael Mulvihill and Kathrine Sandys, show how the phenomenological qualities of the abandoned bunkers appeal to them as artists, as largely ‘blank canvas’ sites which they can appropriate (albeit often only temporarily) and are used in their production of site-specific installation and performance works. Notably, Wilson – as an artist working mainly in the medium of sound – shows how the bunker can be valorised for its acoustic, as well as its visual, atmospherics. Matthew Flintham (also an artist) appropriates an even more unusual cultural feature of the abandoned bunker: its mould. In doing so he productively pushes the notion of cultural production to its extreme – for mould is a culture which replicates itself, taking hold within the bunker’s stale air. As Williams (1983, 87) notes, one of the earliest meanings of ‘culture’ is “the tending of natural growth”. Flintham’s then is a view of the more-than-human enculturing of the bunker – if the mould culture can be said to be self-tending of its own growth. Alternatively, a human cultivator or sorts can be identified in Flintham’s own semantic cultivation, his human valorisation of the mould’s bunker colonising expansion drives by subjecting it to meaning making, by rendering it aesthetic.
Survival cell: the bunker’s battle against entropy
Flintham seeks to show, through his attentiveness to these cultures of mould, that bunkers are ultimately ironic spaces. For within the heart of their hermetic isolation, decay and degeneration (as instances of the entropy – the drive towards loss or energy – that afflicts the eventual dissolution of all things), derelict bunkers are found to be generative, living places. Thus they are ironic because they are both hostile and habitable. Engineered originally as survival cells for humans, these places are now abandoned and inhospitable to their intended denizens. They have been rendered toxic to humans through the proliferation of these moulds and other entropic processes of decay. And yet, the mould, and those wider processes of change, are themselves a form of dynamic change – and if viewed in a wide frame of reference – signs of survival and endurance. In short, the bunker endures and has an existence (and cultures of sorts) even when fully abandoned. Flintham links his ruminations on the resilience of mould to the Cold War-era theorising of cybernetics, the science of distributed systems and self-organisation. Cold War theorising (and the art and fiction that Flintham identifies as influenced by this anxious milieu) was influenced by existential questions of how – and where – to best face-down the accelerated entropy to be witnessed in the face of a nuclear blast. And the best answer to that question was usually ‘the bunker’. Conceived as a sealed survival space intended to facilitate the autonomous survival of Cold War human bodies and other culture-preserving vessels of information, Flintham’s Cold War bunker is largely bereft of human life and apocalyptic scheming. But conflict and survival are both still enacted there, for the bunker is now host to daily battles of territorial expansion and defence waged between extremophiles deep inside this now hostile-to-human terrain.
Meanwhile, approaching decay and degeneration from a more avowedly human (and heritage preservation) standpoint Kinnear makes an impassioned plea for greater attentiveness to Scotland’s Cold War-era bunkers, presenting that call within the context of a narrative of loss (through sites falling victim to both material decay and unsympathetic redevelopment). He argues that increased attentiveness to the architectural significance of these places could spur their greater protection. However, Kokoszka and I show that setting out to save an iconic site may require more than protective heritage and land-use planning designations. We show how the interplay of drives for demilitarisation, heritage preservation and sustainable economic re-use have led to the Greenham Common cruise missile site being stuck in limbo (neither fully alive nor fully dead) since the site was sold off by the Ministry of Defence in 2003. Thus regulatory intervention may have slowed GAMA’s entropy but by no means has it been halted or reversed.
Still transmitting: the bunker’s ongoing resonance
Paul Virilio collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, writing in support of Virilio’s claim that the Atlantic Wall bunkers had a strong mnemonic resonance for him, has recalled drawing up close to an abandoned Nazi bunker as a child, placing his ear upon its concrete flank and listening to hear the “roar of war still trapped inside” (Virilio & Lotringer 2003, 10). This depiction both acknowledges the distinctive acoustics of cavernous bunker-spaces, as the sound of waves echoes within them, and also their affective, mnemonic quality, whereby they trigger his memories of the war. It seems unlikely that Lotringer means us to take his statement literally (i.e. that the bunker itself somehow holds memories of the war independent of its human interlocutors), and Nadia Bartolini (2015) has recently argued persuasively against suggestions that bunkers themselves have a historical and/or militaristic essence which they store and transmit independent of the projections and inferences of particular visitors.
But certainly, the acoustic properties of bunker-spaces are affective, and can be utilised by artists and musicians in their work. Wilson shows how the distinctive acoustic signatures of sites like the domed Teufelsberg listening station in Berlin have been preserved digitally, such that the very distinctive reverb of that structure can be used as an ambient sound-shaping technique in the production of wholly unrelated sound recordings. Thus, an acoustic mapping of a bunker and its echo characteristics may outlast the site itself, its virtual form preserving and transmitting an aspect (but only an aspect) of the bunker’s being. Commenting upon the possibility of virtual preservation and/or recreation of long-lost bunkers Kinnear suggests that virtual recreations inevitably lose a quality that only the bunker itself can deliver – the affective charge of being there as a fully embodied visitor, picking up the musty smells and sense of confinement that Flintham also depicts in his explorations into the Torås mountain-bunker complex.
But to acknowledge these affective charges is not the same as believing that these places are haunted by their histories. Alexis-Martin, Mulvihill and Sandys note the affective charge of abandoned bunkers but conclude that the contemporary cultural interest in abandoned bunkers more rooted in their ‘blank space’ affordances – their semantic openness – than it is in any firmly determining past essence. They argue that abandoned bunker sites do not throw an obstinate military essence at any visitor. Indeed, Mulvihill finds that even when operational military sites may not seem very distinctive at all. Furthermore, Alexis-Martin reports that despite working daily within a former local government Cold War bunker, it was many months before she came to realise that the basement offices in which she was working had started life as a facility designed for nuclear war.
Alexis-Martin, Mulvihill and Sandys show how such places are increasingly sites of free-form play and projection rather than clear communion with an immovably encoded past. Kinnear would take issue with the desirability of such free-play and in his article argues for the importance of preserving (or sympathetically adapting) these structures as a way of retaining both their mnemonic connection to the Cold War past and to their distinctive atmospheres and taxonomic forms. For Kinnear taking the bunker former into the future requires a delicate balance to be struck between preserving the embodied mnemonic traces of the past and finding ways to bring about an enduring preservation via new-found uses. Kinnear believes that there is a resonance from these places – but it could be easily missed if not carefully sought out and protected. Meanwhile, Kokoszka and I find an ambivalence at the heart of attempts to find an enduring heritage status for the GAMA site at Greenham Common. On paper the site has a very strong claim to internationally significant heritage status, but we find heritage significance to be but one shaping influence in the battle for its after-life. The past, per se, is seemingly not an ultimate dead-hand controlling influence over even this iconic bunker site.
Meanwhile, Wilson shows us a second type of resonance – a cultural reverberation. She describes how anxiety about the heightened risk of nuclear war in the early 1980s insinuated itself into popular culture (and popular music in particular), often using bunkers as a motif. This conflation of nuclear anxiety, bunker-talk and new wave synth-pop has in the last decade seen a wry, nostalgic revival; a cultural production that merges a new-found attentiveness to the once-unattainable shelters with the lo-fi musical stylings of the early 1980s, by pop-ironicists such as Luke Haines. These ironic pop-cultural appropriations of the Cold War bunker are perhaps the most playful appropriations of all.
Luke Haines interviewed in 2015 about his British Nuclear Bunkers LP.
Arnold, M. 1960. Culture and anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bartolini, N. 2015. ‘the politics of vibrant matter. Consistency, containment and the concrete of Mussolini’s bunker’. Journal of Material Culture, 20(2): 191-210.
Bennett, L. 2011. ‘The Bunker: metaphor, materiality and management’. Culture and Organization. 17(2): 155-173.
Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. 2003.Crepuscular dawn. New York: Semiotext(e). Trans. Mike Taormina.
Williams, R. 1983. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana Press.
“I try to escape, but the bunker keeps pulling me back in.”
Luke Bennett, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019…
Following in the footsteps of Paul Virilio’s (1994) investigations of the ruins of the Nazi Atlantic Wall fortifications, but by changing the focal point to the ruins of the Cold War, the bunker studies presented in my forthcoming bunker-themed guest-edited special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies broadly echo Virilio’s method: combining accounts of embodied exploration with attentive archival work, and their concern is to achieve both a phenomenological account of the nature of these now-abandoned places, and a taxonomic assessment of the trends that shape the original, present and future lives of life of these structures. Bradley L. Garrett and Ian Klinke and (2019) have recently laid down a challenge to the hegemony of Virilio’s methods and concerns in bunker studies. They point out that the dominant scholarly approach tends to depict the bunker as both a symbol of, and an artefact of the past – rather than of the present and future. They point out that the bunker (as an emplacement of military power) is still very much alive. They also persuasively argue that Virilio’s framing tends to figure bunkers as places of shelter (with its inhabitants as victims) rather than as places of relative safety from which perpetrators plan the extermination of whole cities.
Garrett’s and Klinke’s critique is well made, and points to new areas of scholarship which need to be explored within bunker studies. However, it is not the case that the Virilio-type approach is exhausted. There is still plenty of work still to be done to understand the end-of-life stage of bunkers and of the cultural effects of their affective and symbolic resonance in abandonment. Accordingly, this special issue’s five articles each seek to build upon the broadly Virilio-type studies presented in my 2017 edited collection In the ruins of the Cold War bunker: materiality, affect and meaning making. That collection presented a multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary bunker re-engagements from around the world by 13 contributors, touching in particular on artistic and heritage based-appropriations of these now-abandoned Cold War spaces. As befitting the Journal of War and Culture Studies’ concern with the points at which war and culture meet (and the forms of cultural production related to that intersection), the new articles assembled in the special issue develop an even wider and more provocative set of lenses with which to detect the multiple forms and intensities within which post-military forms of use and meaning making come to be projected onto the blank walls of bunker spaces (including – variously – appropriations by mould, sound, commercial storage, heritage and fine art). Through this they reveal the processes by which (and rate at which) originating war-related uses and meanings fade from these places, thereby enabling the bunker’s after-life.
How bunkers live-on
Over the last decade the after-life of bunkers has become a subject of study across a number of disciplines: from archaeology to real estate, from cultural geography to fine art (see, for example, the array of disciplines represented in Bennett 2017). Accordingly, the contributors to this special issue represent a broad spread of disciplinary perspectives, and survey a wide range of bunker interactions.
Matthew Flintham is an artist and an academic whose work focuses on representations of military landscapes. In his article ‘Vile Incubator: a pathology of the Cold War bunker’, he investigates the after-life of the Torås bunker complex in Norway, reflecting on both the embodied act of bunker exploration and the ongoing non-human cultural production that he finds in this supposedly dead, lifeless abandoned place.
Louise K. Wilson is also an artist and an academic, and her work has investigated iconic Cold War military sites like the former testing range at Orford ness in Suffolk, through site-based installations and audio art. In her contribution entitled ‘Sounds from the bunker: aural culture and the remainder of the Cold War’, Wilson considers the appropriation of Cold War bunkers’ distinctive acoustic atmospheres and of 1980s bunker-themed pop songs in contemporary music production.
In their collaborative article ‘“Mine are the dead spaces”: a discussion of bunker work’s atmospheres, limits and routines’, Becky Alexis-Martin, a cultural geographer whose work specialises in nuclear geographies, leads a discussion with artists Kathrine Sandys and Michael Mulvihill, using the surroundings of the Churchill War Rooms, a Second World War bunker deep beneath Whitehall in London, as a prompt for considering the valence of the bunker to artists and its other denizens. Sandys is an artist and academic who, like Wilson, has worked with the distinctive audio-visual properties of empty bunkers. Mulvihill is an artist who has recently completed a practice-based PhD based around a residency at RAF Fylingdales.
As an architect, Sean Kinnear’s article ‘Reopening the bunker: an architectural investigation of the post-war fate of four Scottish nuclear bunkers’, presents an assessment of the underappreciated architectural significance of Scottish Cold War bunkers, outlining their distinctive architectonic qualities and profiling in his four case study sites, four different approaches to preservation and after-use of these structures. Kinnear calls for greater heritage protection to accorded to these sites in Scotland.
In the special issue’s final article, ‘Profaning GAMA: exploring the entanglement of demilitarisation, heritage and real estate in the ruins of Greenham Common’s cruise missile complex’, I consider with my former student Philip Kokoszka (who contributed fieldwork as part of his 2018 MSc dissertation) the strangely mundane, indeterminate fate of GAMA, the once-iconic cruise missile bunker complex built at RAF Greenham Common in the early 1980s. We do so from the perspective of real estate and land-use planning, and seek to show how an appreciation of the entanglement of a number of contemporary cultural drivers (demilitarisation, ruination, heritage preservation and re-utilisation) can help to account for the site’s unexpected ‘failure’ to become a formal monument to its Cold War past. In conclusion, reflecting upon this out-turn, we attempt to suggest – using the work of Giorgio Agamben on ‘profanation’ – that this failure of the site to achieve a singular new meaning may in itself be fitting.
How bunkers die
The autumn of 2019 saw much attention focused upon the iconography of the ‘Berlin Wall’, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of its fall. Considerable efforts were expended to destroy the wall in the early 1990s – achieving its near-total erasure in a matter of months. This was a campaign of physical demilitarisation that assured the ending of German partition would be irreversible. In contrast my special issue considers the endurance of a more diffuse, harder to destroy, and less prominent set of Cold War material culture: the bunker. As with the Wall, these structures are iconic, mnemonic even. The articles contribute to the ongoing development of bunker studies by showing that these obstinate structures are not just materially durable (for they manage to retain some of their original war-related purpose embodied within their strange, brutal forms) but also fluid, in that they are caught up in an ongoing cultural production which over time enables a loosening of war-related meanings, a loosening that can bring both new utility, and also episodes of playful irony. This loosening contributes to the attrition of the bunker’s original form as both war-related materiel and as a potent symbol of war. Ultimately, this loosening is found to be the product of a quiet, long-term semantic decay, a subtle, slow-burn form of cultural demilitarisation which strikes quite a contrast to the speedy, systematic physical erasure of the Cold War’s more evident and destroyable military structures, like the Wall.
Note: the JWC special issue will be published in January 2020. The articles will appear online at the Journal’s website (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ywac20/current) in advance of formal publication, and three of those articles have been uploaded there so far.
References
Bennett, L. (ed.) 2017. In the ruins of the Cold War bunker: affect, materiality and meaning making. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Garrett, B.L and Klinke, I. 2019. ‘Opening the bunker: function, materiality, temporality’. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(6): 1063-1081.
Virilio, P. 1994. Bunker Archeology, New York: Princeton Architectural Press (Translated by George Collins).
Image Credit:
Sean L. Kinnear (2018). Cambridge Regional War Room now incorporated into a residential estate development.
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