070 RUINS
‘WELCOME TO ORFORD NESS,’ Artangel’s director, James Lingwood, declared as he greeted a small group of arts writers to this windswept island off the Suffolk coast for Artangel’s main summer event of 2021, Afterness. A former UK ministry of defence (MoD) testing site, now uninhabited except by hardy sheep, rare plants and birds and a poignant collection of sculptural, sound and written art works placed around the derelict laboratories and abandoned nissen huts. ‘Tis is a place in a state of curated decay,’ he quipped. It felt like an apt summary, not just for
Orford Ness but for our times. As the planet warms and global economies implode, ‘curated decay’ feels about as good as we can hope for. And when the world hits a high pitch of existential angst, it’s often the cue for a deep dive into the past, into the ‘romance’ of bygone ages, expressed through art, literature and architecture. As Svetlana Boym declared in her 2008 essay ‘Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins’, ‘Te early 21st century exhibits a strange […] fascination for ruins […] In our increasingly digital age, ruins appear to be an endangered species, physical embodiments of modern
paradoxes reminding us of the blunders of modern […] technologies, and the riddles of human freedom.’
With blundering technologies now dominating our lives and freedoms increasingly compromised, small wonder that buildings steeped in history – from the 20th century to the ancient – are establishing themselves as the favoured symbols of rebirth and regeneration: status with in-built soul.
A glimpse at the design media of summer 2021 reveals a plethora of projects that seek to harness the kudos and craftsmanship of past
CASE STUDY ORFORD NESS
Orford Ness is an extraordinary island in a remote spot off the coast of Suffolk. From 1913, it had been used by the UK War Department and the Ministry of Defence for military experimentation, including the testing of aircraft, radar, homing beacons and atomic bomb components. When they moved out in 1993, it had been barely used for some time, and the island was slowly being reclaimed by diverse wildlife. Which will have inspired the decision to donate this uninhabitable spot to the National Trust, who have continued this bold re-wilding initiative, only occasionally interrupted by summer visitors. What brings these visitors to the site – and drives them to return many times – is
that dual charge of seeing rare birds and plants thriving in a place once used to plan only destruction. The island has to be accessed by a small and infrequent ferry boat, and there are few creature comforts, apart from one rudimentary toilet and an information hut. The point of being there is to revel in its wildness and its atmosphere of life interrupted: abandoned nissen huts, an octagonal, timber-clad lookout tower, rotting concrete laboratories and pavilions used to test explosives, it’s all there, just as the MoD left it – though given that history, it’s best to stick to the strictly prescribed paths that lead around the island. Over summer 2021 (and hopefully again in 2022) some of
these haunting structures have been occupied by artists, creating site specific works for a programme devised by public art pioneers Artangel. The poems of Ilya Kaminsky (born close to the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in Odessa, Ukraine, now living in the UK) can be listened to on headphones while walking between certain structures, including the octagonal, timber building – known as the Black Beacon – that also features field recordings by Iain Chambers, Chris Watson and Brian d’Souza, for a work titled Library of Sound. The building was constructed in 1927 to develop radio systems for marine navigation. Visitors to it now hear archival field recordings, captured on the Ness at various times of year, including boots on shingle, strong winds, the drone of a single bee.
Artist Alice Channer has inserted a spiky, metal sculpture like a mutant thorny plant into a small shelter next door. Shaped from rolled aluminium bars with sharp thorns welded onto the metal, they are designed to evoke both nature’s resilience but also the possibility of virulent mutations in nature caused by experimental fall-out.
Emma McNally has created a large, floating cloud of drawings that hovers above the floor of the concrete bunker known as the Armoury. Its dark multitude of circles and marks made with graphite on paper evoke subatomic particles in a cloud chamber, radar waves, or burning forests.
Most viscerally spooky of all is Tatiana Trouvé’s installation (The Residents) in Lab 1 – built in the 1960s for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment’s testing programme. Roofless and filled with water and wild plants, this lab is now ‘furnished’ with Trouvé’s haunting flotsam, speculative detritus from lives in transit: a suitcase, blankets, a child’s shoe, chairs, books and clothing lie around looking like the real, fragile thing but actually most of them are cast in aluminium or bronze. They speak of communities fleeing from danger, or obliterated in some apocalypse. A ruin brought to life in spectacularly eerie fashion.
TATIANA TROUVE
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