In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making

ISBN-13: 9781783487332 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 280 str.

Luke Bennett

Opis

During the Cold War military and civil defence bunkers were an evocative materialization of the deadly nuclear stand-off. In its aftermath many of these sites were abandoned and left to ruin. How does the origin of these concrete spaces shape their identity? What use are the ruins of these bunkers now? This volume explores the effects of and responses to this declassification via abandonment . It explores how the bunker becomes a fertile ground for the study of meaning-making, place-attachment, hobby practices, social materiality and trauma studies. It explores the bunker as a heterotopic place in which the sensory atmospheres, thingly arrangements and narrative potencies are skewed away from the commonplace dispositions of the world, its domestic interiors, and affordances of bodies, living and dwelling. A concern with the phenomenological qualities of these places as contemporary ruins will sit alongside scholarship inclining towards an interrogation of how these places embody, and/or otherwise connect with their Cold War originations and purpose. Each essay will reflexively consider the process of engaging with these places and whether via the archive or direct sensory immersion. In doing so the book will broaden the bunker s contemporary signification and contribute to theoretically informed analysis of ruination, place attachment, meaning-making, and material culture."