Bunker Hauntology

Abstract: “This architecture floats on the surface of an earth that has lost its materiality” (Virilio, 1967)

In Bunker Archaeology (1967), a seminal book by Paul Virilio, the renowned cultural theorist presents a typology of modern war ruins through photography and reflective text. He represented the remains of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall as important European cultural heritage, imperative (if oft-overlooked and neglected) reminders of the horrors of global war. Bunkers, batteries and pill boxes litter Europe’s western beaches today. Despite their imposing physical presence along the coastline, Virilio describes his primary experience of them as one characterized by absence.

In Views from Sunk Island (2022), an essay film and photographic series by the author of this paper, an echo of these remains is explored on Britain’s eastern shore. The bunkers here are threatened by rising sea levels and rapid coastal erosion. Even during the months of production, things were shifting profoundly, with fortresses crashing onto beaches and batteries disappearing beneath the waves. The UK has no equivalent muse on the value of these endangered objects as cultural heritage. This presentation explores the haunting significance of these disappearances, and the role photography and the digital archive can play, in preserving a trace of these bunkers, both as part of Britain’s cultural memory and a gesture towards revealing and re-evaluating some of the darker parts of our own heritage.

The paper also explores the role of the author’s own practice research – returning, revisiting, and re-photographing these sites - in interrogating the selective memory of photography itself, and how this might be counteracted through iterative practices.