To visit silence after the blast, 2023 - ongoing
This first part, one of three acts, presents a walk by a subject wearing an anti-radiation suit through the ruins of a film set built in Durango for the shooting of Fat Man and Little Boy, a film that narrates the development of the Manhattan Project, whose outcome led to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I find the historical trajectory of the set compelling; it seems to have fallen victim to its own atomic fiction.
The walk is a choreography performed through butoh that explores the mineral and physical dimension of the radioactive elements used in nuclear weapons. This dance form emerged in Japan in the aftermath of the trauma caused by the detonations of Fat Man and Little Boy.
In the 1970s, a missile aimed at Los Alamos —the U.S. military site where the Manhattan Project tests were carried out and which was reconstructed in the Durango set— veered off course and struck not far from this location, in the same desert where the film was shot, leaving nuclear contamination in the area.
It seems that Hollywood fictions seek to manifest themselves once again in this very desert.
WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU DO HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE, LET IT STAY HERE. Those are the instructions that those involved in the Manhattan Project were told to follow. When I visited the ruins of that town, I found some old signs that I used to write down the same mantra that could be seen on the facilities related to the Manhattan Project.
These are dyptics displayed as forensic evidence, showing photographies I took when I visited those ruins, sparce internet pictures from that same place and declassified U.S. government documents from the Project Manhattan mixed with the original script of Fatman and Little Boy.