In the final weeks of the US election, as the world chewed fingernails
and the nights grew longer, Julian Charrière and I jumped ship. We
travelled to the Marshall Islands, a constellation of atolls some four
thousand kilometers south-west of Hawaii, spread over 37,000 square km
of the remote Pacific. Upon arriving in Majuro, first town past the
international date line, we boarded a refitted pearl-diving boat and set
sail for Bikini Atoll. It would take three days of swell, on the beam –
rolling seas and stomachs – before we would reach its lagoon.
Bikini lies at the outer fringes of collective imagination – on the
horizon of military-industrial endeavor, colonial excess and
contemporary infrastructure. For the last sixty years it has been a
veritable ghostland. Between 1947 and 1958, 23 of the most powerful
manmade explosions in history occurred there. During this period,
American bombs delivering a combined fission yield of 42.2 megatons were
detonated. The force of one of these, codenamed Castle Bravo, was
enough to vaporize two islands and gouge a massive crater – measuring
2000 metres in diameter – out of the primordial reef. Another threw a
fleet of 70 captured and decommissioned WW2 battleships – some of them
up to 250 metres long – up into the air. A few were ripped to shreds.
Others, like the USS Saratoga and the HIJMS Nagato – storied flagships
of the US and Japanese navies – eventually sank to the bottom, where
their rusting hulks remain today. During this period, obliterated
geology would become radioactive particles, carried on the wind to then
fall on nearby communities. Meanwhile, the people of Bikini, who had
been ‘asked’ to temporarily leave their home to make way for a series of
experiments ventured “for the good of mankind and to end all wars”
began to learn the meaning of an exile that continues until present.
Today their physical ungrounding is further paralleled in the realm of
linguistic identification. MS Word’s autocorrect allows ‘Bikini’ but not
‘Bikinian’. Rather than a place, a culture, or a people, the
designation has – as we all know – become most associated with a
swimsuit, created by French designer Louis Réard, who named it with an
eye to explosive allusion.
The aim of our expedition was to explore Bikini’s atomic landscape while
Charrière developed a new body of work. Over the course of four weeks,
spent accessing abandoned sites, above and below water – from muggy
jungle to the rusting Pacific Ghost Fleet, submerged deep below
sea-level – we shot material for his new video piece entitled
Iroojrilik. Daily, at dawn and sunset, Charrière also worked on a photo
series documenting the crumbling command, control and observation
bunkers that ring the lagoon. In addition to time behind the camera,
there were deformed coconuts and other abnormal biological specimens to
collect, as well as Geiger counter readings to attend to – keeping us
tuned in to the unseen, and critical, radioactive dimension.
Every morning we shot the wrecks, diving with double tanks and a smaller
third containing 84 percent oxygen for use during decompression
procedures. The 50 metre descent, with camera and lights in tow, would
invariably deliver the bow of a warship with hydrodynamic lines as big
as buildings; rust, guns, and huge propellors emerging out of brackish
plankton soup. These were groggy visions – the dark sleep of modernism,
the height of 20th Century engineering, overturned, sometimes torn up,
by the explosive force of atomic technological achievement. From midday
onwards we would put ashore at one of the remaining islands of the
atoll. Here we were seeking angular concrete bunkers, situated on sandy
shores like lost pyramids – rebar poking out through their rotting walls
– or hidden beneath thick palm fronds.
One day, Julian and I are out on a sandbar as the day begins to wane. By
the time we are set up a cloud of rain sets in and our gear becomes
hopelessly exposed. I grab the video camera and run to the island’s
bushline for shelter. Julian stays put to shoot stills. I take in the
scene of pink and blue sky, and an empty beach, but for us, in the
middle of the Pacific. I find my first conch shell. It is big and
ancient – a token for a natural world that I have often imagined but
rarely known. It is sitting in white coral sand, next to a
weather-beaten a plastic toy gun and a disintegrating MDF office table.
The moon rises above the water like sixties celluloid. Somewhere,
someone has won.
The next day we are up before dawn to capture its break, but the sun is
hidden, instead, behind a grey lump of cloud. The boat is already in
motion and we are steaming towards the Bravo Crater; once the epicenter
of the biggest nuclear explosion in history. As we draw closer, our
geiger counter increasingly vocal, I climb the stairs to the bridge.
Immediately, the Captain – mid satellite-phone call to his mother –
blurts out the election result. Down. We drop into the crater left by
the bomb and are immediately surrounded by four grey reef sharks. I turn
around and another is right behind me. I take pains to look it in the
eyes, show it the full length of my body and blow intimidating bubbles.
My BCD keeps inflating, involuntarily, and I cannot keep my depth
steady. The dive is unsettling. I tell Julian as much once we are back
onboard but he has a different take. There, at ground-zero, in a
man-made crater brought into being by a paradoxical combination of too
much cunning, willful ignorance, adventurism and imperious greatness,
was something worth noticing: A few heads of coral, even schools of
colored reef fish. All this, growing in the veritable depths of hubris.