LMNZ Nuclear Plant / Control Mechanisms

Marisa González

Lemoniz Nuclear Plant was built in the 70's, some 20 miles out of Bilbao in a steep and vast coastal spot. The imponent and controversial group of buildings, which never got to be inaugurated for the purpose they were built, can be seen from the road stretching between Bakio and Plencia. (panoramic photograph 1).
The two cylindrical monumental buildings, housing the reactors, the turbine chamber and the whole aggregate of facilities adjuncted to the nuclear reactors have become an essential document of the late 20th century industrial archeology.
This industrial macro-complex, sitting on the Bay of Biscay's seashore vertebrates, overlooks and delimits the extraordinary nature surrounding it, offering a sad and dissonant spectacle amidst a superb environment dominated by the sea, beaches, mountains, vegetation and cliffs (panoramic photograph 2).
During the elaborate and extended building process of the plant, thousands of people participated. In this process, the most diverse and sophisticated techniques and the most advanced technological innovations of the day, custom-built for this project by numerous national and multinational companies, came together.
For years, its gigantic premises awaited an order that would set them in motion, order which never came for very different reasons. The nuclear plant was never inaugurated. And the reactor, a shining circular organ, waited for a uranium which never reached its destination due to the final cancellation of the project by the authorities.
Against it, there were strikes, public protest demostrations, and deaths, all of which rendered unworkable the start up of a macro-project which for years remained silent, inactive, waiting for the allocation of a new site or for its almost impossible demolition.
The access to Lemoniz has since then been greatly controlled by means of extreme security measures which at present continue to be implemented with utmost strictness, which allows me to consider my entering it, with the purpose of documenting what goes on inside, as a true revelation, as well as a privilege, due to the cautiousness and opaqueness that usually surrounds the functioning of nuclear plants in general and of this one, sleeping through time, in particular.

Approaches to Lemoniz Nuclear Plant

My first approach to Lemoniz, which probably is the most critical one, tries to present this plant as a monster generated by a dream characteristic of scientific or, more accurately, techno-scientific reasoning. A frightening barren creature, much as the enormous skeleton of an impossible chimera stranded on a desserted and alien beach, in its overwhelming vegetal splendour, in its disturbing uselessness.

The second approach is framed within the most orthodox line of modern art and stresses not so much the contents as the formal and material qualities of the manifold technical devices -actually assembled in the plant itself-, with the aim of generating sensory spaces evoking my experiencies as an artist in the plant's interior.

The third one, of a more historic and documentary kind, attempts an imaginary reconstruction of what this overwhelming nuclear energy generator was or tried to be.

My first visual inspection, as I came into the greatly deserted and monumental spaces of the plant, took place on January 2002, during the first dismantlement phase. It was like going through the remains of a shipwreck. It took me many days in successive trips to unearth all the mystery surrounding it and manage to progressively reconstruct the scale and dimension of the architectural volumes and their contents. I witnessed the destruction, by means of controlled fire, of the sophisticated high precission technology, custom-built for these premises. (photograph no.) I discovered the constant presence of water, carried through a complex network of pipes hidden beneath the ground, which goes through all the areas of the plant, much as the veins and arteries in our bodies.
The fierce Bay of Biscay's sea delimits and attacks the plant, which protects itself through an incredibly long wall cordoned off by means of barbed wire fences and security cameras. Of the extreme and strict security meassures hardly some continue to be active, the remaining being noticeable through the constant presence of the innumerable security cameras and endless danger signs warning of the risks that toxic and higly polluting substances involve as well as the ubiquitous fire prevention signs and warning signals against possible sabotage or technical failure (photograph no.)

The essential objectives of this project are:
1- Detailed recording of the currently in progress dismantling of the plant.
2- Testimony, overtly subjective, of my experiencies at the plant.
3- Criticism of the fallacy of memory destruction by means of the artistic and aesthetic evocation of Lemóniz's dismantling.

Exhibition
The Lemoniz Nuclear Plant project is a work in progress piece that gets configured along the successive exhibitional spaces. It is a memory exercise with a nucleus of argumentation dominated by the living/dead; document/memory. A narrative of the fasely useful. The features of range and complexity of the theme being dealt with render it impossible to be displayed in all its breadth in a single exhibition. This project was created by means of long hours of video recordings, innumerable photographs and endless objects, documents and stuff rescued from the plant. By means of this compilated material I have constructed objective installations, video installations, monochannel videos and various photographic series.
The photograhic series are divided in diferent sections: documentary/ descriptive/ material/ architectural/ objective series.
The Objective Installations stage the transformation of the documents rescued from the plant and have been created and gathered according to the various families of their components. The diversity of these objects, elements and artefacts rescued from destruction, allows the creation and construction of ambiental spaces of highly changing nature, yet all of them being linked by the common sign of their origin/ diversity and abandonment. They all speak about their inactivity/ uselessness.
The videos, both the monochannel and the video installations follow a document/testimony line that in some instances may approach the documentary. The main themes of the videos are security under its various faces; destruction it is phases of dismantling and dismemberment of the plant's premises and machinery by means of fire as the main element in the fragmentation and work, recording of workers in action in a "tour de force" against the great nuclear monster.
With all this material, the aggregate of exhibitions divides into various parts, according to the different readings or approaches feasible.
The whole of the process is derived from direct experience at the plant.

Part 1. Security/control.
Security controls both physical, environmental and technical.

Part 2. Destruction.
Recording of the breaking up, dismantling and removing by means of human toil.

Part 3. Industrial architecture
Inner/outer spaces. Spaces both dynamic in the course of destruction and static while displaying the desolation and abandonment. The resemblance between the plant's architecture and that of jails is mainly discerned through the extreme security measures, both in their actual conception and geographical location.

Part 4. Social-political-historical
A consideration of the plant from a social perspective. Its development within the expanding and megalomaniac society of the 70's. Detractors and supporters of nuclear energy.

Reactors as an emblem of security, strength and power will preside over the whole of the exhibitions as a difference paradigm identifying a certain nuclear plant from another thermal or electrical energy one.

LEMONITZ NUCLEAR PLANT. PART 1 SECURITY
The whole project includes very different readings, which would be impossible to dealt with in a single exhibition due to the multiple objective installations, numerous photographs and hours of video recording.
This exhibition, created for Burgos' CAB, focuses on Security and Control. I chose this first part because I consider security to be the central axis of the whole plant, in all its possible aspects and readings, the technical, technological and human. Besides, I bring it forward as a metaphor of the great social problem of protection that developed societies experience, both in the sphere of labour and politics as well as in that of physical survival.

Space 1
Photographs. The reactor as an exponent space of maximum security presides over the room together with photographs of the various takes from the security cameras embedded in different points of the outer barbed wire landscape.

Space 2
The video installation is situated in yet another room. Six short videos are projected in a loop onto four different screens which contents display various aspects on security. From entering the "minus twenty height" underground to the itinerary along the impressive walls delimiting the space between the central and the sea by means of an extremely long wall.

Space 3 (El titulo lo he cambiado por Fallo General he quitado motores)
Installation: Complete Breakdown
If security is present throughout the whole project, in this installation a special emphasis is placed on the exhaustive controls of various nature that existed in the plant, both human, physical and technological. This space is constructed by means of the multiple precision devices that recorded and gauged the light, temperature, wind, pressure, salinity, etc. and the light-boxes constructed by means of the alarm signs taken from the main control room. The spectator will be immersed in a medium of information transmission, continuous warnings and finally inoperative data.

The work being presented follows the course of action of the previous project "La Fábrica" [The Factory] presented at Madrid's Fundación Telefónica in 2000. It is a new look at the reiterative theme of the memory/amnesia opposition in contemporary art.

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