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 people who come on this 'pilgrimage' talk, eagerly exchange information, knowledge and experiences, filling this empty landscape, for a moment, with the voices it usually lacks.
For something to happen it often needs to happen twice, the world also ended in 1945, in Trinity, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project tested the first of the atom bombs.
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. Or perhaps what we experience here, is the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.
According to Timothy Morton (Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 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 inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.”
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. in Vienna
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
