Bunker Archaeology, 1958–65, giclée print, dimensions variable. ©Sophie Virilio
For his reflections on the influence of technology and war on modern consciousness, Paul Virilio (1932–2018) is known today as the philosopher of speed. In the late 1950s he became fascinated by the thousands of Nazi “blockhaus” bunkers abandoned along the coastline of France—a coastline Virilio grew up next to, but never experienced as a child due to its fortification during WW2. Encountering these strange buildings as an adult must have paralleled the strangeness of the sea itself—the “liquid continent” he could not access even when it was right next to him. Though built during the Nazi occupation of France twenty years before, the abandoned bunkers appeared to Virilio as ancient ruins, but with geometries suggesting alien spaceships. For the philosopher, they also evoked intimacy between modern reason and violence. The bunkers were constructed to wage war on the coastline, but without any immediate threat following the war, could only stand contemplating the infinite expanse of the ocean itself.
Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, the title of both a 1975 exhibition in Paris and of a book of short essays accompanying the photographs he took between 1958–65, is now known as a reflection on a limit point where warfare—as the sublime expression of modern technology—can only turn against itself. Situated where the land meets the sea, the ruinous melancholia of Virilio’s bunkers shows the futility and the pathology of security, the intimacy between self and enemy, home, and prison. Today, these structures are clear emblems of territorial conflicts whose nature has profoundly changed. “Fortress Europe” was a term used by both sides to distinguish Nazi-occupied Europe from Allied territory. Now the same term is used by far-right political parties seeking to prevent non-Europeans from entering, but also to limit the movement of “foreigners” from neighboring countries within the European Union itself.
Taipei Biennial 2023 reprints a series of 27 photographs from the series, with two additional bunkers standing as sentries guarding the first and second floor galleries.
