BOLDSTEP HALF-LIFE (2011)

Sound installation collaboration Cathy Busby + Barbara Lounder at Deifenbunker, Debert, Nova Scotia, 2011. We talk back and forth about being at this 1960 bunker protesting its existence and its exclusive entry for politicians in 1984; and then our circling back there in 2011 when the space is converted for a artists' group exhibition. 

SCRIPT: It’s February 29th, 1984, the same day Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau announces that he is stepping down, and we’re standing at the T-junction that leads to the bunker at Camp Debert. We are on the outside, stopped at the barricades. Why?

We’re here to protest “Operation Boldstep” - NATO’s integrated exercises, a dress rehearsal for WW III. Thatcher and Reagan are rattling their swords, and the nuclear arms race is at a feverish pitch. The military is rehearsing from fall-out shelters across the country.

Top secret.

Inaccessible.

We’re here to debunk Debert, to draw attention to the folly of planning to survive a nuclear attack.

“Operation Boldstep.” Who came up with that name?  
Our name is the “U.S.”, the “United Spinsters” affinity group. We’re a group of women here to mourn the potential loss of life, to rage at a system that put military profits ahead of the health of people and survival of the planet, to defy keeping quiet about it all and reclaim the power to envision a de-militarized world.

Why? What do we imagine will happen in the future?

We imagine nuclear disasters, screaming and scorching, a poxed, peeling, burning, emptiness, a sorrowful landscape.

It’s two years later- April 26, 1986. Chernobyl. The nuclear reactor explodes, sending clouds of radioactivity across the continent. Some die immediately, scalded and poisoned. Others die more slowly, and cancer rates soar in the region. The land is ruined.

The Berlin Wall comes down in 1989 and the Cold War is over. There will be no more Nato exercises like “Operation Boldstep.”
 Now it’s May, 2011.

After 27 years, we’re inside of the bunker. We never thought this would happen in our lifetime.

The barricades are gone. We’re warmly welcomed by an artist friend.

(Whisper) Who would have thought everything would be so well-built and maintained?
 (Shout) Built to last. Like being in a vault – locked in!

Who built the bunker?

There are map drawers of architects’ drawings right there in the cafeteria. There’s so much space here … a maze, this confusing plan of chambers inside chambers, with no up, no down…

Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3, Zone 10 and so on. Yes, everything is ordered, much has been removed now, making what remains all the more present and poignant, ready for a different kind of newcomer…
 How many Zones are there? How many doors? How many operation manuals? How much careful labeling, specimen identification, design flourishes, like the striped tiles in the men’s washroom? How many fan belts, broadcast booths, potassium iodine tablets, fuses, jars of oven cleaner?

The quality of the crafting is admirable. It’s been well maintained over the years, don’t you think?

The air is a little frosty, musty, there’s a mottling of mildew here and there. 
A geothermal pox. But excellent for re-purposing as data storage.

In 1984 when we were protesting ‘Operation Boldstep’ we didn’t even have personal computers. Now the bunker is home to Dataville!

Backing up everyone’s clouds.    Mitchell’s inhabiting the space.    The space has an artists’ overlay, acknowledging its past, making a comic strip of it, its authority deflated, painted over. We couldn’t have imagined such a fitting transformation of this bunker. Mitchell’s work here and there underlines what now seems like a surreal idea about war and survival. Isn’t it funny?

Oh yeah- now the bunker seems hilarious - Cold War paranoia architecture revealed. The bunker is stripped down to sparse furnishings and fittings.

We are inside this space that is being transformed, not by rhetoric or protest, but by gesture and colour and image and mischief.

Mitchell’s paintings overlap the military crests painted directly on the walls, like kid’s summer-camp badges. What’s he up to?

He’s re-writing this space, expanding this historical document room by room. Did you see the room with the black light, and day-glo colours, jumping out, fading back, a palimpsest?

It’s a fun house! With ghosts, a hidden text, and secrets over the secrets. Mitchell painted a glow-in-the-dark portrait, just the head, of Diefenbaker, the prime minister responsible for the network of bunkers across the country completed in the early 1960s…the ‘Continuity of Government’ program. Mitchell dreams here, it’s a dreaming space, a time outside of daylight…it’s disorienting here inside Dataville…

What is it like outside?

Life is so much better now, and so much worse…I think of the assassination of Osama bin Laden and its intensifying of the American “War on Terror”. Are we headed for a new Cold War?

What were we fighting for?

This science-fiction feeling reminds me of decisions being made now. Think about the earthquake in Japan and the Fukushima nuclear reactors spewing radioactivity into the environment. There is no escaping it.

There is only so much uncontaminated water.    
No more Diefenbunkers across Canada, but militarism has slipped into more and more palatable forms, more mainstream– did you notice that giant sign with smiling men and women in fatigues, acting like it’s normal, easy, even fashionable to be in the military, to go to war?

DND smiles and ‘rebrands’ itself - everyone needs marketing advice.  How easily did we go along for the ride with NATO into Libya? We weren’t consulted. We didn’t consent. Democracy let us down (again).

Do you know what’s going on outside?
 The village of Debert is still tiny, and it seems to be waiting for the next big thing… the industrial park signs look so tired.

What’s happening out there?

A groundhog just popped out of the culvert, a fellow tunnel dweller. 
The deer are walking overhead, two stories above us, grazing in the wet spring grass. There are deer in Dataville. Can you hear them?

----------------------------- (loop back to beginning)

It’s February 29th, 1984, the same day Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau announces that he is stepping down, and we’re standing at the T-junction that leads to the bunker, at Camp Debert. We are on the outside, stopped at the barricades. Why?

We’re here to protest “Operation Boldstep” - NATO’s integrated exercises, a dress rehearsal for WW III. Thatcher and Reagan are rattling their swords, and the nuclear arms race is at a feverish pitch. The military is rehearsing from fall-out shelters across the country.