Bik Van der Pol

The first atomic explosion did not happen in Japan: July 16, 1945 was marked by the first atomic bomb test, in the Jornada del Muerte (historically referring to it as the Journey of the Dead Man), a desert in New Mexico, in an area that today is called Trinity site, located in the White Sands Missile Range. The events that took place at this site (under the codename Manhattan Project) changed the world, but went long unnoticed by a wider public or were not seen or understood in their full radical meaning.
This piece of land transformed in the public eye from secret nuclear test site to a tourist attraction.
Twice a year, this silent area is opened to the public, and becomes an event, a museum for a day, a pilgrimage, where the curious, veterans, schoolchildren and others form a temporary community, for a few hours. And they talk, eagerly exchanging information, knowledge and experiences, filling this empty landscape, for a moment, with the voices it usually lacks. There is nothing to see, apart from the everyday, totally normal activities of these special visitors, forming a contrast to the experience of the immense emptiness of the landscape.

According to Timothy Morton (Hyperobjects, 2013) we can be "uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely,