Connie Samaras,
"America Dreams"
(page 3 of 7)
II. Back to the Future
Figure 5 Connie Samaras
Buried Fifties Station
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
Since the mid 20th century, when the U.S. first began to seriously
squat the region, there have been three stations built at the South
Pole. The first, constructed by the military, was a series of modest
wooden structures not unlike those pictured in the 1951 film version of
The Thing, where aliens and humans duke it out at the North
Pole.[4]
Never removed, these buildings are now almost entirely iced over,
thus my image is an aerial photo of where the fifties station once
stood (see Figure 5). Built at the start of the
Cold War, the exposed vulnerability of these simple wooden modular units
personifies the theme of that era's Thing—"keep watching the
skies" for an externalized "threat" to a fictionally coherent American
"lower 48." Additionally, if one watches early film footage of
soldiers assembling these low-slung wooden kits (the walls often the
same height as the troops), the unassuming design for the (then) future
"space" colonization bears none of the markings of present day hyper
consumer economy. Instead, it harks back to the simple mail order
housing kits sold at the end of the 19th century by Montgomery Ward to
growing westward populations settling areas newly cleansed of indigenous
Americans.
Figure 6 Connie Samaras
Dome and Tunnels
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
The next station, perhaps the most iconic one, is the Buckminster
Fuller Dome built in the early 70s and now in the process of being
"decommissioned." Its interior set of red buildings have already been
removed (see Figure 6). In a sense, this edifice embodies
the legacies of contemporaneous social change movements, predominantly
Fuller's utopic (thus somewhat problematic) environmentalist vision for
the collective stewardship of spaceship earth ("we are all astronauts")—one
that emphasizes individual responsibility, the power and primacy
of design, humanist ideology, and technology as the force of ultimate
liberation.[5]
It's interesting to consider that the Dome was designed
and built during the height of political activism in the U.S., including
the development of separatist movements among women, queers and people
of color, as well a highly visible anti-war movement critical of U.S.
imperialism and the then new war technologies like Napalm. The
humanistic aspects of Fuller's beliefs were, at the time, do doubt
comforting to those invested in the ongoing project of American
modernity, where the "good of mankind" and scientific rationality go
hand in hand and where the foundation of these ideas, masculinity and
whiteness, remain normalized. All this said, when compared to its
box-like, relatively enormous replacement, there was an undeniable magic
to being inside the Dome with its simultaneous layers of inside and out.
Although the then "next" new and improved look of the future, the
Buckminster Fuller design is almost as a modest as its predecessor both
in its human scale and the simple durable design of interlocking
triangles—a feature I employed in mirroring the image I took of the
dome's main living berths, focusing on the refrigerator-door escape
hatches (fire exits) at the back of each compartment (see Figure 4). And
despite the interior's initially plain look, small individual design
interventions abounded, especially in the sleeping quarters. It was
telling that the upper echelon of the station's management, having first
choice between quarters in the new station or the Dome, all chose the
latter as their home.
Figure 7 Connie Samaras
Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station
digital print
Courtesy of the artist
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 |
4 | 5 |
6 | 7
Next page
|