Vile Incubator: A Pathology of the Cold War Bunker

Abstract

This article presents a ‘pathology’ of the Cold War bunker via an analysis of the decay, entropy and post-human fecundity to be found within the closed system of these now abandoned man-made protective cavities. Opening with a contextual overview of current research in bunker studies, and providing an orientation to the variety of bunkers to be found across the US, UK and Europe, the article then presents fieldwork in recently opened bunker caves on the Norwegian island of Tjøme, foregrounding the complex’s after-life as an incubator for the extremophilic organisms and crystalline formations growing within it. These inhabitants adapt the bunker, producing a post-human ‘bunker culture’ of sorts, manifested in alien forms of survival and inter-organism conflict, that strangely echo Cold War science’s research into entropy and cybernetics, and that war’s co-option of matter and culture to apocalyptic, existential ends.

KEYWORDS:

• bunker
• Cold War
• entropy
• pathology
• mycelium
• efflorescence
• fungi

Notes on contributor

Matthew Flintham is an artist and writer specialising in representations of landscape and issues of militarisation, security and surveillance. He has a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, an MA in Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, and a PhD from the Royal College of Art. His work intersects academic and arts practices, exploring speculative relationships between film, architecture, power and place, and the possibilities for arts methods to reveal hidden relations in the landscape. Between 2016 and 2019, he was ECR Fellow at Kingston School of Art, and a most recently, a Research Associate in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge University.

ORCID

Matthew Flintham http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1585-5098