In Culture Production Corridors: A Bunker
by Taryn Tomasello
There are lots of speculative fictions, lots of apocalyptic fantasies.
When I was first pregnant, I was overwhelmed by a sense that this world is a hard and broken place to be born into, with climate change, contemporary global politics, late stage capitalism, and a general sense of precarity. When I talked about this with my mother she said, “Yeah but there is always some imminent threat of the end of the world. We just keep on living.” And she listed a few past examples not excluding the Cold War and plague-era Europe.
However, since that talk, I have come to feel like we are in fact witnessing and part of the geriatric stage of humanity with dwindling potential for finding some savior balm or serum, whether technological or social. In geological, meteorological, and even evolutionary time, I imagine this decline could still go on for thousands of years. Which is daunting, considering what people will be and already are being exposed to: famine, natural disaster, violence and harm due to competition for resources. For some people life is already an environmental nightmare, a trash pile nightmare, a war. The permanent state of exception has already been established and is operationalized by governments the world over.
Today, very rich and fearful people are making luxury bunkers. Attempting to survive the consequences of their excessive accumulation. They are prepping for the “Worst Case Scenario.”
Doomsday capitalism refers both to the doomsday economy, which is a business sector that caters to people who prepare for a mass disaster, as well as to the idea that capitalism itself is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. And on this spectrum between these two extremes, humans still live and so does culture. If culture is what we transmit through society, then Culture continues to be produced as a residue of time. The Vivos Group is a California-based company that invests in old military bunkers and remarkets them to wealthy people. They also design and build luxury bunkers and procure large land geological sites and structures to build larger bunkers that they bill as the “back up plan for humanity” As though you could save a draft of humanity on a drive and then reboot.
Form Study
Before the current era, it was difficult to separate the idea of the bunker from acts of violence and war. Reactions and defense.
In Bunker Archaeology, Virilio describes the post-World War II cultural shift as a “dematerialization of the classic war apparatus.” We were no longer simply defending against combat that escalated from localized ground and naval conflicts, then aerial warfare; we moved into a mode of full-blown spatial control following the colonization of space which exponentially expanded the potential for war moving into new realms of verticality, spatiality, temporality. This made the large old WWII era military bunkers Virilio was looking at obsolete due to their ability to protect only from limited types of horizontal artillery blasts.
Even so, the Cold War ushered in a time where governments around the world funded the building of fall-out-shelters, unreinforced shelters designed to protect people from too much exposure to falling radioactive particles after a nuclear attack, consumer/civilian bomb shelters designed for single family usage. These were mostly for short term use and varied in size.
Currently, Bulgaria boasts the largest number of such short term survival bunkers. Apparently 900,000 people can shelter in the reinforced subway tunnels alone. It’s possible that these shelters built during heightened periods of global nuclear threat were more of an emotional security act than one meant to actually protect people.
Bunker Archeology
In and around Kayseri, Turkey there are around 200 ancient underground cities: series of passageways that link room to room, as many as 18 stories deep, 300 ft underground that date to around the 12th-8th century BCE. The air shafts were disguised as wells. The tunnels and chambers had stoves, functional wells, wine production, storage for livestock and olive oil. All of them were equipped with emergency escape routes in case an immediate return to the surface was necessary. A whole city could live underground for months with their animals, allowing the inhabitants to survive an attack of marauders.
Bunker Time
The prior conceptual space of a bunker was transient - you would go into it and then come out once the danger had passed. The current shift is from transient danger to one that exists with undefined terms or a permanent state of imminent collapse. We are in a “state of protracted emergency.”
Bunkers share a conceptual affinity with submarines and spaceships as isolated contained spaces for the survival of some situation that is completely inhospitable to human life. In fact the greatest challenge for all of these survival structures is the challenge of maintaining clean water, clean air, food production and waste removal. Unlike these other built survival environments, the bunker is immobile. It must stay put. A human needs another spacecraft to get to a spaceship or space station -needs another submarine to get to a submarine or submarine station. However, A person can walk from the door of one bunker to the door of another and knock (or knock down) the door.
The bunker is the shack made of sticks of the life-sustaining survivalist vessels. It is unsealed, permeable. Dependent and vulnerable in its immobility. Its strength is the fortress nature and the invisibility of the burrow, literally protected by the earth. Like a crab settling down in the sand to wait out the rising tides. The bunker, like the failed and alienating creation of city planners known as the cul de sac, has only one egress. The contemporary bunker has to be a fortress against both unknown and known threat.
Collectivity and Bunkers
People have so many reasons for their desire to plan for the future selfishly. Environmental Collapse and the question of whether there is some way we can escape is a repetitive whisper in the back of my consciousness. However, the leisure to plan ahead is a luxury not everyone has. Subsistence and daily struggle take up most people’s time. For many, they are experiencing Bare Life. And for many, we are so alienated by the situation that we don’t even have the desire.
As for Culture, humans need to be coexisting in order to produce culture. What kind of culture exists in relation to the various possibilities of Bunker futures?(1)
There have always been separatist isolationist groups. For instance, the gated community phenomenon is pretty close to the walled fortress of medieval Europe which is not that far from the Bunker communities built by Vivos, but still there is an air of isolationism I just can’t shake. There are no commons, no shared passageways or courtyards, in the bunker.
The Outside
The ancient Underground cities in Turkey were designed for the Collective survival of a whole community. They desired to survive an attack. But from whom? An Enemy outside.
When the desire is to escape some kind of climate disaster or the social upheaval that accompanies a climate disaster, there is no outside. Because the outside is part of it and we are part of it and we are the cause and the effect.
How we choose to bind together or relate becomes even more important at this time. For many preppers the mentality is “us against them.” They are libertarians, eschewing government of any kind, believing in separatism, armed self-preservation.
When the focus is on individualism there is a futility of finding common ground. Preppers believe in the irreconcilable danger of being in relation to others. They are trapped in the ouroboros of individualism and alienation.
Aesthetics of survival
Bunkers are no longer an element of war against an external enemy, but have become a folded-in capsule of our denial of the fact that we ourselves are our own worst enemy. Misguided individualism, lack of communalism, and cultural fragmentation are bringing about humanity’s demise. Each doomsday capitalist’s underground mansion, or each repurposed war bunker at Vivos XPoint (the world’s largest bunker community in South Dakota) functions more as a tomb or a crypt, preserving a simulacrum of daily life. This feels like a desire to be buried alive.
Conclusions
I’ve had an allergy lately to anything that feels like closure, given the current state of the world. We are in the middle of a civilizational schism around the idea of what it means to relate to one another. It is dishonest to end with an ending.
So we have to ask: what choices are left to us? What is it we are hoping to survive? And what is it we are hoping to return to if we do?
(1) At the farmer’s market last summer, I met a man who had a box of kittens for sale. I was interested, so he gave me his number on a piece of paper. I called him later that day and we made a plan for the rest of my household to go together to meet the kittens at his home. The address was for a house in the middle of an unremarkable residential neighborhood in our city. When we arrived, we saw custom all-weather plastic banners covered in writing about the 4th Amendment of the Constitution stating that we were “Under surveillance- private property- no unreasonable search and seizure by the Federal Government.” The yard was enclosed by a solid-metal gate. We rang the doorbell and a different man opened the door. He told us to hold on and shut the door. After a time, the metal side gate swung open and we were led into the property. There, we found a series of open workshop spaces and mounds of gravel and dry scaping with drought resistant plants and lots of carved wood. We noticed a packed earth stairway leading down into the ground. We asked what was down there. Although he was initially demure, calling the underground space “a meditation chamber,” he eventually admitted, after some tactful questions and compliments, that yes, you could definitely “bunker down there for quite some time.” Apparently, the dry scaping and hand-sorted gravel was his way of covering his substantial underground complex. The external mounds of dirt and terraces were the negative spaces of his tunnels. We went home with one of his kittens. Later, the kitten almost died from a vaccine-preventable disease; the bunker man had initially implied that it had received all its necessary vaccines. When I reached back out to him, he informed me that he would never do that because the government uses vaccines to control all of us, including –he implied – pets and livestock.
Taryn Tomasello
is an artist living and working in Portland, OR. She makes art at the intersection of text, event, image, material and objects. She is concerned with witnessing and latency. Through collecting and handling forms and ideas, Tomasello's work functions as a critique of our history and our present, endeavoring to make sense of irreconcilable futures. Although research is an integral part of Tomasello’s practice, she maintains a deep affinity with the uninvited. While Tomasello has shown in art spaces across the US and internationally, her best work often exists outside the confines of traditional gallery settings and beyond the reach of conventional documentation. Tomasello holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College and a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.