Lemóniz. History, myth and ruins at a nuclear plant's cross-roads.

By Carlos Jiménez(*)

The history of nuclear energy, so factual and positive as any of the remaining modern histories, has a fleeting, glittering and ghostly double. Considered from a purely positive standpoint this history speaks about who, when and how the theoretical atomic disintegration model was discovered; about how, who and with what means that possibility was carried out in technical terms, giving rise first to the atomic bomb and later, to nuclear plants, whose task was to tame the huge amount of energy unleashed by atomic disintegration with the precise, worthy intention of using it for productive, peaceful purposes -if peace is at all possible in this explossive by definition domain-. However, Lemóniz -Marisa González's work in progress- evidences that this history of nuclear energy is irremediably defective, insufficient and that for this very reason it attracts, summons or sucks in -as if it were a low-pressure atmospheric area- eccentric or tangential narratives and deviated readings which are superimposed on or infiltrate that history, thus altering, confounding, tangling it. Nevertheless, that insufficiency shouldn't be mistaken with that other one which characterizes the remaining positive histories, for this one obtains its possibility condition, its location -as it were- out of nothingness' labour which undermines both the legibility and legitimacy of nuclear energy's history, secretly transforming it in a symptomatic or ciphered discourse of the nihilism inherent to contemporary power. A two-sided nihilism, just as power itself. On one of the sides -in which power is directly revealed as political power- the complete mastering of nuclear energy for military purposes as a matter of fact established a new limit to the capacity inherent to that very power to decide about the life and death of us all. Where before exclusively moral, legal or political restrictions of that annihilation capacity -of an illimited tendency- operated, an unheard of, imponderable factor came into play: the balance of terror, or to phrase it in an apparently more technical language, the MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. In the 1960's, the two superpowers -American and Soviet- balanced their respective nuclear arsenals only to find out that they couldn't be effectively employed because the annihilation of the enemy through these means could only be attained at the cost of one's own destruction. At the climax of its full realization, the absolute power by nuclear weaponry proved its radical impotence as it was directly and immediately transformed into its converse: the power to destroy oneself. And that triumph of impotence over potence, of nothingness over will, which Nietzche attempted to heroically conjure by placing the "the will of nothingness" over "the nothingness of will", also contaminated that side of power that in modernity intends to achieve not so much the domination of fellow creatures as of nature itself; both our own, the human, and that of others, and alien one: whether inanimate, vegetal, animal or savage. The mere existence of unleashed nuclear energy declares that the will to dominate nature has reached its ultimate end and, of course, its termination as regards to the until then unheard of capacity to destroy with one single blow the nature it attempted to dominate. The specifically late-modern craziness -the above mentioned MAD- reveals as no other psychotic mode does the impassable limit of the Modern project. Its implicit nihilism, its radical meaninglessness. To put it paraphrasing one of Leni Reifenstahl's unfortunately most fecund documentaries; the triumph of will consists in its annihilation.

II In the remarkable work that Marisa González has created so far, both the photographic and video images of the building which in those days was erected to house one of the two reactors at Lemóniz, occupy a central space; images in which the rigorously functional architecture takes on the appearance, and even the character, of a temple. To achieve this, she isolates them -by means of carefully chosen frames, both from its natural immediate environment and from the aggregate of buildings to which it is joined, thus deliberately underlining its hieratism and monumental character. The building's design, its trace, consent to the purpose of the artist, for they differ from the image most frequently associated with nuclear plants, which is that of a bulk in the shape of a double cone crowned by a perpetual whitish cloud of steam. Instead, its model seems that of the Pantheon, that intersection of a cylinder with a semi-sphere by which Imperial Rome attempted to organise and unify the orb of the gods that in ancient Greece still was a conjunction of discrete and heterogeneous realms entwined in many different and inextricable ways with heaven and earth, plants, animals and mortals. Yet, Lemóniz reactor's see differs from its hypothetical model in a decisive aspect: the cella , an hermetic and sacred, tabu precinct which kept the image, to which each temple was consecrated, out of direct contact with the faithful. At heart, the Pantheon's architecture is nothing but a variation on the spatial model of the Roman senate, with all the gods there gathered displayed as senators, on an equal level and around an empty centre illuminated from above by an occuli , an inaccessible eye that reverently gave the right of way to a light then considered as the unique manifestation of superhuman power, which made possible every certainty. But if the Pantheon establishes the threshold between monotheism and polytheism on which Catholicism is indefinitely stopped, Lemóniz -interpreted as a temple in the disquieting images of the reactor's see created by Marisa González- unfolds as an icon of the absolutist power characteristic of modernity. In this hidden, armour-platted and inaccessible heart, an omnipresent and wild force operates, whose annihilating power yields under the craft or, rather, under the technical craftiness of specialists, and becomes its reverse: a beneficial power -beneficial for it is controled. Yet, ordinary people don't really know how this technical stratagems do work, and instead intuit, feel, fear that this power will be unleashed again, when least expected, and bring about an incalculable catastrophe such as the ones protagonized by Harrisburg or Chernobyl nuclear plants. As it becomes conscious, there is an attempt to appease that fearful relationship with contemporary power's ominous nucleus by resuming myths and legends which in the past were also offered as a means to exorcise and placate the gods' devastating wrath.
What I just mentioned about Lemóniz being a symbol of modern power could certainly be considered as one of a compensatory narrative. But it certainly lacks the long tradition or vintage character of other such tales, firmly rooted in our culture's imagery. I mean, for instance, the myth of Prometheus, the primeval hero who (in Hesiod's Theogony ) steals fire from the gods as is ruthlessly punished for his audacity. A myth that, transferred to the realm we are concerned with, serves to summon up or exorcise the always dormant fear of nuclear energy. It summons it up when it is used to moralize about the terrible consequences (for their inconmensurableness) of the challenge of natural order implicit in the discovery and usage of nuclear energy. And it exorcises it when it is used to underline the exemplary worthiness of Prometeus' conduct which, in spite of being punished by the gods with the atrocious torment of the vulture that devoured his vowels, decisively contributed to emancipate humanity from the gods' tutelage by giving them the secret of fire. All this to say nothing of The Sorcerer's Apprentice fable, who was overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of his disquieting experiments.

III
The Lemóniz project should be situated in the broader and more lasting strategy of Marisa González's artistic work, centred on her interest in industrial archaeology. As it is known, this is a relatively new academic discipline whose foundational moment roughly coincides with the crisis of Fordist industrialization model that took place both in Europe and America in the late 70's. In those days large industrial complexes became empty, orphaned of use and interest, doomed to an inexorable decay from which both industrial archaeology -which finds in them imprescindible historical documents of a past in danger of extinction- and urbanistic plans intended for recycling obsolete factory sites tried to redeem them. This last tactic is the most relevant one in New York's Soho, where old textile workshops set up in the early 20th century and abandoned by their owners after the attempt of Mayor Edward Moses to construct a great circular avenue around Lower Manhattan, were transformed into artist, architect, designer and advertiser studios. A similar phenomenon took place in London's dock facilities, which were recycled for similar purposes. In Spain, processes of this kind have also taken place, such as the transformation of an old beer brewery into Joaquín Leguina's Library (in Madrid), or that other one which consists in turning a 19th century textile factory into CaixaForum -the main headquarters of Fundación La Caixa Modern Art Collection. Obviously, examples could effortlessly proliferate.
For her part, Marisa González joined those tendencies in her own fashion with La Fábrica, an elaborate artistic project created between 1999 and 2001 whose main motif was the breaking up and knocking down of a well-known bread factory that functioned in Bilbao's city centre for most of the last century. However, although the Lemóniz project shares with La Fábrica both the intentions and general outlook, it must be said that there are differences between them worth mentioning. The most relevant one is the varying degrees in which the provisionally called Pompeii Effect affects them. As is generally known, archaeology was born as an autonomous scientific discipline through the digging out of Pompeii (and Herculaneum) and reconstructing their past way of life. Aims to which the fact that the eruption of Vesuvius volcano in year 79 of our Common Era buried the two cities under successive layers of ash, mud and lava at a single stroke greatly contributed. As a result of this natural catastrophe, the excavations enabled the first archaeologists to discover two almost intact cities where both their town-planning and local authorities, their forum, public baths, houses, mosaics, murals and graffiti, and even the bodies of many of its inhabitants surprised in the middle of their daily activities by a death through suffocation were left standing. Actually, the Pompeii thus rediscovered gave a full, beforehand meaning to the verses of poet Leopoldo Castilla: "Each street is a photograph/ and death is the photographer". This quality of a past frozen forever in one of its instants was already present in the bread factory, whose dismantling and knocking down was documented and interpreted by Marisa González in various photographic series, videos and installations. But it was still more evident in Lemóniz inasmuch as this plant was almost intact at the time when her research work started. And this was so in a much greater degree than Bilbao's bread factory mainly for two reasons: Firstly, although the plant had been entirely finished in the early eighties, it never got to start functioning. When only the enhanced uranium mass remained to be installed at the heart of the two reactors, which would have enabled them to start functioning as energy generators, the bussinessmen and Spanish political authorities supporting the project decided to keep it in the freezer indefinitely. Without a doubt, behind this decision was the magnitude of the public demonstrations against the use of nuclear energy that took place during the early years of the Transición, which ETA tried to subordinate or instrumentalize by murdering Lemóniz's chief engineer on February 1981. Therefore, this plant never operated and thus, it was never exposed to the various kinds of wearing that use inevitably produces. The other reason for its immovility lays in the actual fabrication of the plant, whose supporting structure, walls and shutters were expressely designed -as in any of its counterparts- with the purpose of offering through its exceptional strength and solidity the greatest possible resistance to the uncontrolled expansion of nuclear accident's dreadful consequences, which no security system -no matter how strict and efficient- allows to completely dismiss.
The conjunction of these two factors has turned Lemóniz into some sort of industrial archaeology's Pompeii which, in passing, conferred a specific slant to the work that Marisa González based upon it.

IV Although it is evident that Marisa González's work presents various features and lines of development, the artist herself has repeatedly insisted on the crucial role that memory recovery plays in it. And this is no trivial matter, for it refers to a concern which is not exclusive of her, nor even of industrial archaeologists, but rather comprenhends a vast range of disciplines and currently belongs to the realm of public consciousness, as the powerful modern contemporary conservationist movement proves, which having plentily overflowed the boundaries of archives and museums has enforced strict regulations for the protection of city centres and historical monuments in cities. This is what Andreas Huyssen called the "museization of the world", a phenomenon which hides its very weakness behind its own strength. As yet another poet, in this case Mr. Antonio Machado, already stated in an absolutely revealing verse: "we sing what we lose", which is the lyrical version of a traditional motto : "the swan's song", a bird that, as everyone knows, only sings before dying. Beneath the two expressions lies a single intuition or suspiction; when an excessive determination is used to exalt or celebrate something, it is very likely that this something is either dead or in its way to be so. This is the reason why I suspect that under the emphatic reivindication of memory that we are currently immersed in lies a growing and perhaps irreversible general memory loss. Or, to put it in short, everyone's amnesia. When I say this, I am not only thinking of teenagers and youths totally absorbed by the electronic and audiovisual galaxy, who do not, who cannot remember anything older than Madonna's first singles, if they do remember them at all. No, what I really mean is the amnesia that undermines the circumstances and means of traditional memory as a cancerous metastasis. The first explanation for this amnesia comes from the pen of evolutionists: if function brings about the organ, the decay of the function brings about the organ's damage as an inevitable consequence. Thus, the proliferation of artificial memory devices, from the invention of writing to the electronically supported databases, brought about as an inevitable consequence the weakening of human memory, which became less and less necessary. Seemingly, now there is no need to remember anything but the basic set of instructions that allows us to enter Google's web pages, where every, I insist, every currently available information about the present, past and -somehow- future is at our disposal.
I won't argue here about the validity or invalidity of this interpretative outlook, less so when biologists have proved that the Darwinian model leaks through all its flanks, something that Michael Foucault had timely warned about. Instead, at present I am really interested in underlining the fact that Marisa González -whether she knew it or not- approached Lemóniz, as she previously had the bread factory, by using three distinct modes of reactive action upon the generalized amnesia phenomenon. The first one -photography- which as I argued elsewhere made visible for the first time through technical and extremely automatic means the distinctive character of modern history by evidencing the fragmentation and, more than the fragmentation, the strict compartmentalization that this history proposes and implements on past, present and future. The second one concentrates on the purely exhibitory value -as Walter Benjamin would put it- of the vestiges, or -if preferred- relics from the past. And the third one is video, which turns images of the traces of the past into raw material for its endless random operations.

V When material vestiges from the past are being venerated, preserved, documented or researched -much as modernity has systematically done- they become ruins. Thus, Marisa González has approached the remains of Lemóniz by granting or acknowledging that condition. However, two of the additional attributes of modern ruins -the conservation and intangibility imposed on them- have a perverse nuclear replica that once again sends the positive historical discourse that conforms and orientates them off the rails. I mean the residues, or nuclear waste that results from the normal functioning of nuclear plants, which keep their lethal and yet intangible effect beyond every historically foreseable limit. The truth is that Lemóniz is an allegory of our tragic, and therefore inevitable, destiny.

(*) Writer and art critic. Author of Extraños en el Paraíso. Ojeadas al arte de los 80 and Los rostros de la Medusa. Estudios sobre la retórica fotográfica.

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