The Bunker’s After-Life: Cultural Production in the Ruins of the Cold War

Abstract

The contributors to this special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies all seek to explore the question 'what happens to bunkers after a conflict has ended?' Traditionally wars end with a wave of demilitarization, a purgative, destructive process that seeks to either remove or repurpose military structures, to the extent that they are no longer required for defence (

Future‐proof: bunkered data centres and the selling of ultra‐secure cloud storage

“…By contrast, the bunkered data centre strives to maintain the bunker's original threat‐related uses and meanings (cf. Bennett 2020: 3). The Fort data bunker thus embeds cloud storage not only within the material remains of a military redoubt but also within its security logics, imaginaries, and futures.…”

Concrete clouds: Bunkers, data, preparedness

“…A focus on the bunker as a data storage site invites us to trace other anxieties that the nuclear threat threw into relief, such as the possibility of a major data loss event. Attentive to the ‘data pasts’ of the bunker, this article thus responds to recent calls to re-read and rethink conceptions of the form and function of these built spaces (Bennett, 2020; Garrett and Klinke, 2018: 16). I then proceed to trace the emergence of the bunkered data centre industry before exploring how data bunkers surface as imaginative sites of data preservation and security today.…”

Tourism and beyond: Commodification of communist memoryscapes in Central and East Europe

“…As such, they represent both a demonstration of power and testimony to the cultural paranoia of the time. In words of Bennett (2011Bennett ( , 2017, "their brutal physical expression in concrete and their powerful dark resonance in language and imagery" frame these spaces as sites of traumatic, haunting and affective memories. Consequently, the Cold War bunkers, as the permanent "scars" in the urban landscape, through last several decades consistently attracted significant interest of both scholars and heritage practitioners, investigating the possibilities of cultural engagement and adaptive reuse of the concrete reminders of the Cold War anxiety (Kinnear 2020) Financially unviable and structurally unfit for modification, despite their apparent attractiveness most of the Cold War bunkers in post-socialist Europe remained ignored, sealed and abandoned for decades.…”

“…Rather than remaining dark "anomalies" in landscape, these spaces are getting revitalized, valorised and re-integrated by artists, private investors, urban explorers, tourist companies and bunker hunters. Indeed, despite the stiffness and solidity of both their form (concrete structure, inaccessibility) and function (isolation, power, defence), the bunkers are becoming "a cultural playground" (Bennett 2017;Stromberg 2013), a malleable and mutable configurations which reflect changing attitude towards history and space, contemporary economic and political exigencies and "pragmatic improvisations of those who co-opt these relics into their practices" (Bennett 2017, p.11). Moving beyond the cultural and emotional legacy of the Cold war, these bunkers are increasingly re-used and re-purposed through private initiatives, and turned into different kinds of museums, art spaces and even night clubs.…”