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The
plant/ The Castle
Santiago B. Olmo
Nowadays,
the idea of security is increasingly related to an insane practice of
control, and from there new (social and political) values have developed
through a disturbing restoration of what just a few years ago were anti-
or counter-values restraining freedom.
The project The Nuclear Plant LMNZ/ Control Mechanisms by Marisa González
deals with some of these issues and problems from an incisive, highly
subtle and complex view which uses documentation as a tool of analysis,
while weaving a visual narrative in which symbolic elements compel to
recontextualize security within the mechanics of control. Her work is
not documentary, nor is it inclined to atmospheric reconstruction, even
if those elements are present by way of methodology.
The exhibition proposes three levels which are embodied in three connected
spaces: an installation entitled Complete Engine Breakdown , in which
a large number of measuring devices and control clocks that belonged to
the plant's control system are used, a room in which various videos submerge
spectators both in a territory delimited and enclosed by walls and wire
fences and in the "minus twenty height" corridors, and a room
where various photographies of the reactors' imposing bulk and the camera
based surveillance systems that encompass the plant's perimeter are gathered.
The whole intensity of the images is fixed and made concrete in a view
which selects fragments and traces as emblems of a complete sliding of
meanings.
The project follows a method in which the work process itself constructs
a reflective and analytic nucleus through the displacement of symbols,
meanings and images of the ruins of Lemóniz nuclear plant centred
around the idea of security and the concept and performance of control.
Lemóniz nuclear plant has a history, a tragic one in many senses,
which explicitly sums up the contradictions of both Spain's recent history
in relation to the bleeding wound of ETA's terrorism and the evolution
of ecological consciouness into a resistance against the notion of scientific
progress, triumphant since the advent of "technological reason"
positivism and "capitalist reason" pragmatism.
Marisa González's view focuses on the symbolic complexity of the
whole and tries to analyse in depth, as if it were the chapters of a finely
structured narrative, the various elements that constitute that ruined
space. Security and control not only embody a first approach but, above
all, a symbolic overture of reflection upon the imagery of -industrial,
contemporary- ruins.
The whole of the surveillance and control system at Lemóniz was
directed to prevent the risk of catastrophe, radioactive leakage or accidents
of unforeseeable and lethal consequences which could be caused by failures
in the nuclear energy production system. This surveillance system also
controlled and restricted the access to the plant, with the aim of preventing
people unrelated to the work developed in it from being exposed to radiation
for lack of adequate protection or, contrarily, preventing the system
from being sabotaged or bombed out, thus causing a catastrophe.
In The Castle Kafka constructs a metaphor of impenetrability, of power
as something not only arbitrary but also indiscernible, distant, always
depending on a long series of subalterns impossible to sidestep. The plant
is an industrial bunker, it is like The Castle.
In Lemóniz, as in every industrial complex involving the risk of
catastrophe, strict control systems exist in relation to security measures
that seek protection.
In his characterization of the contemporary world, Paul Virilio underlines
the centrality of accidents and catastrophes, which appear as symptoms
of the permanent risk that industrial production systems and communication
networks -both based on speed- involve. The catastrophe is the element
that shapes and articulates a new landscape of devastation, whereas surveillance
and control systems tend to become the structure from which things are
directed and organised.
The stage of Lemóniz nuclear plant sums up both the image of catastrophe
and that of control and security within an aura of failure by which its
condition of ruin, of derelict place in the process of being demolished
is conferred.
Security and control also is a binomial which defines the contemporary
as a result of the global phenomenon of fear. Stemming from the recent
construction of a policy based on fear and suspiction, the instruments
serving for protection are at the disposal of generalized control, obsessive
in its mechanics and indiscriminate in its methods. Within this frame
control doesn't merely exist in relation to protection, not even in the
affirmation of security, but rather it is activated as a basic mechanism
regulating social functioning. Control acts as the new axis of social
and political relationships, thus imposing a new limits and restrictions
scheme.
The reconstruction of some of the symbols of what control has meant during
20th century history becomes possible through the images of Lemóniz
plant's ruins: concrete walls, barbed wire, metallic fences, turrets and
surveillance cameras, sirens, alarm devices and risk measuring systems.
The dramatic experience of large scale armed conflicts and their derivatives
in massacres and genocide, have instanced an archive of control images
as a synonym of horror. Let us think about the way barbed wire and surveillance
turrets evoke the image and scene of Nazi concentration camps or Gulags.
However, these images have not only not disappeared but been repeated
and perfected through other control and repressive systems during the
20th century, to the point of recapitulating and updating the novels which,
from the anti-utopic perspective of science-fiction, attempted to outline
a peculiar history of the catastrophe based in control.
When in 1932 Aldous Huxley published A Brave New World, European societies
were immersed in deep social upheavals that announced the emergence of
political systems of totalitarian character, in which individuals progressively
lost their decision, thought and political intervention capacities by
becoming subjected to the dictates of the state, the only one political
party, social class or the people. At that point the sinister machinery
of the work or extermination camps wasn't yet implemented, but the emergence
of a society of control was already perceptible as a catastrophic possibility.
The picture that Huxley draws in his novel is that of a society of anaesthetized
individuals, whose lives are subjected to permanent control, made drowsy
by means of a social drug (soma) and where the need for leisure is soothed
through a compulsory television system. All this centres around the goal
of giving the impression (the mirage) of perpetual happiness, free from
worries, settled in a secure destiny. The level of control is what determines
the degree of happiness, by means of freedom reduction as the indispensable
condition for an ordered and efficient social functioning. For this social
harmony to be achieved it is necessary that without exception all individuals
accept the dictates and methods of happiness through control. After the
World War II catastrophe, George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four, a novel
, published in 1949, pursued the premise of systematic control as an instrument
of totalitarian order from a very different perspective. However, the
panorama that Orwell outlines in Nineteen-Eighty Four is not precisely
that of compulsory happiness: control has invaded daily life and there
is no longer any personal sphere which remains hidden from the power.
If Huxley's world presented a certain luminosity which, perhaps, lended
that unreal happiness to it, Orwell's is dark, gloomy and opaque, and
it reflects the failure of the technological as a means of strict control.
Meagre interiors tend to predominate, where anguish and oppressive feelings
unfold: confinement has given up hope.
Although the modern world shows coincident aspects with Huxley's drowsy
if glittering society, the surfacing of cracks from beneath appearances
relates more to the catastrophe that Orwell sketches out of the excesses
of control.
The permanent look of Big Brother in Nineteen-Eighty Four has been reproduced
as a symptom of danger and fear in the innumerable surveillance cameras
now present in the streets of many cities. The surveillance cameras which
were initially installed inside banks, buildings, entrances and premises
that needed to be controlled now also sweep the streets. However, in many
cases these systems have enabled to arrest terrorists (such as the etarras
who murdered a town policeman in Barcelona and whose escape was unintentionally
recorded by a cash dispenser camera) or other delinquents (such as the
youth who kidnapped a child in a Brittish mall and later murdered his
victim). Surveillance and its systems also act as an important dissuading
element that, in spite of not impeding nor preventing crime, limits it
and, in certain instances, provides the means to capture the people responsible.
Present-day control shows the ambiguity of security and it alters the
experience of public and private spaces through the display of its mechanisms,
while it also generates a symbolic space for restraint and, of course,
fear. This is the context that explains a film like Minority Report, from
Steven Spilberg, in which a society that has established a system for
the prevention of crime, which enables to act before it is actually committed,
in the previous instant, at the right place, is staged. Preventive War
Theory, inaugurated in Irak by North American George W. Bush Government,
constitutes one of its most wicked applications, for it involves the violation
of international law.
In this sense it is very interesting to study how the concept of security
has evolved from the harmonic and balanced idea of "order" towards
the chaos of the catastrophe that implicitly emerges along with the idea
of "control". On the present Brazilian flag, that instituted
the Republic which in the late 19th century anihilated an Empire established
by the Portuguese monarchy as a peculiar form of independence, reads the
motto "Orden e Progresso" . Order was a political synonym for
stability, inner balance, and it functioned as an equilibrium mechanism
in the conscientious observing of the law. However, in those days, behind
the idea of order a social structure was being doomed to paralysis, for
it was very often based in privileges and exclusions: any particular measure
or bill which wasn't intended to perpetuate these very structures could
be considered as an attack against the order, as subversive or as a synonym
for insecurity.
From the nineteenth and through the twentieth century security has been
expressed by means of the idea of order, which in turn has progressively
evolved through the necessity of control. Meanwhile control, which began
to be systematically applied in imprisonment institutions by the introduction
of the Bentham panopticon, has invaded both the social and political space.
The panopticon, which shaped the new prisons during the nineteenth century,
involved the eradication of the dungeon, a dark and hidden space where
prisoners were left to the freedom of their own privacy, in order to structure
a space where convicts were completely exposed to the warder's visuality:
the central situation of the panopticon building's warder allows to exert
an exhaustive control of the premises and to reduce the private space
of the people being watched.
Thus, as the social structure progressively adopts a panopticon system,
which reminds of Orwell's world, although an illuminated and fictitiously
open one, control determines which industrial and energy-related buildings
(such as nuclear plants), that are subjected to the catastrophe risk dynamics,
become impregnable fortresses, hermetic and secret bunkers. However, homes
have also progressively taken on a bunker-like and small fortress character.
Armour-platted doors and chains were widely spread in cities as dissuasive
burglar-proof methods which protected the quotidian privacy space. Yet,
the visual appearance of many cities has also been transformed by the
necessity of dissuasion, security and control. In a city like San Salvador,
which growth during the 20th century was carried out by means of housing
estates of semi-detached houses with front gardens open to sidewalks and
tree-lined streets, urban landscape progressively experimented a constant
transformation of its various elements after the armed conflict which
degenerated into one of Central America's most cruel civil wars. First,
the gardens were enclosed by walls, then windows and doors were fixed
with iron bars, fulfilling the role of fences. Later, walls, balconies,
roofs and eaves, windows and terraces were protected by means of razor
blade barbed wire which reminds of and points to the barbed wire of trenches
in its convolution and shape. Barbed wire invades everything and becomes
a symbol of urban identity for the attentive eye that knows how to isolate
the accessory as if it were essential.
This phenomenon functions as a symbol of the long civil war's shadow,
but also reflects the decay of security after the demobilization and peace
process which left all former soldiers, whose formative and qualification
experiences took place in the realm of violence, in the hands of delinquency.
In recent times barbed wire (they come in varying sizes and curvature)
has been laid on door jambs: armour-platted doors no longer suffice for
they are susceptible to being pulled up and only the hindrance of wire
fences is capable of dissuasion. Thus, San Salvador displays barbed wire
as a distinctive, almost ornamental, element which embellishes and decorates
the houses' profile much as a fringe or embroidery would: the skyline
emerges as barbed wired, the razor-sky-line. Marisa González produces
a symbolic reinterpretation of control and security under the evocation
that Lemóniz's industrial ruins suggest, embedded in a landscape
of deep Romantic undertones. The ruins in front of the sea construct a
symbolic image of control and of the failure of technological utopia which
in turn needs to become an anti-utopia, or a negative utopia, much as
Orwell's, in order to survive.
In the Lemóniz work, which relates to the reflection upon the decay
and destruction of the industrial world that the artist already tackled
in the project La Fabrica , there is an attempt to retrieve an aesthetical
view that integrates the ambiguity involved in being afraid and yet claiming
for freedom.
There are few images as beautiful and evocative of contradiction as the
one shown in one of the videos by this artist: the waves of a fierce Bay
of Biscay's sea breaking against the concrete walls which protect the
plant and falling in explosions of water. On top of the wall there are
electrified fences and security cameras directed towards a relentless
nature. In his novel The desert of the Tartars , Dino Buzzati expresses
a feeling of uselessness and greatness, of anguish, fear and despair.
In the tale, narrated in the first person, a soldier keeps watch, from
the battlements of an impregnable fortress, on an immense desert from
which, year after year, the invasion of the tartars is expected to come
and never does. Another metaphor for this modern world which is running
out of them.
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