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,
The reemergence of a public debate about possible uses of nuclear energy and the phenomenon that the topic has long been absent from the media, were impulses for the artists to go and visit Trinity Site in order to collect material for a film, that was presented for the first time at the Secession.
The work at the Secession consists of an installation with a podium and video (30 min), but is shown as well as stand-alone video only.
Music in the film:
TIC, TIC, TIC (1949) by Doris Day
CRAWL OUT THROUGH THE FALLOUT (1960) by Sheldon Allman
URANIUM FEVER (1955) by Elton Britt, the Yodellin' Cowboy
Nutcracker Suite - Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Tchaikovski - [/sm]