Between 2013 and 2014 I went for long walks on the Ligurian seashore, precisely, in the area of Monte Moro (more or less 15 km from the city centre of Genoa). Stretched out throughout this area, is a concatenation of bunkers built at the beginning of World War Two by the allied forces. Although these bunkers hardly ever opened fire during the war, they remained active and in use until the landing of the American troops. Thinking of those hikes, I can only wonder about the way structures so “dreadful” in appearance can blend and adapt so well to the environment that contains them. Somehow, it is as if these structures always existed. Their anthropomorphic conformation justifies this reality, but only partially, in my opinion.
 

Now: what's so important about these structures? In Bunker Archaeology Paul Virilio writes about bunkers as structures belonging to a broad military system, though differentiating themselves from the traditional Third Reich's architecture. They were developed within the context of modernity, that also made itself increasingly felt within the military industry. With WW2, weapons and the whole warfare apparatus experienced a technological shift, a turning point within which the bunkers must be considered. But, despite these circumstances, they seem to assume a mostly mythical value: the physiognomy of a greatness that will reveal itself totally ineffective at a practical level. Following a totally modern fabrication process – of which the use of concrete is but an evidence – they belong to a wide strategic system that extends through great part of the Atlantic coast and that, aside its premises, is linked to the notion of unidirectional war, a war fought on land, that does not contemplate water and air.
 

However, as combat techniques are progressively evolving, distance and obstacles – the first and foremost problems of all military strategists, as Virilio tells us - are quickly diminishing.

«A homogeninzing process is under way in the contemporary military structure […] this homogenizing movement of combat techniques and instruments of warfare is coupled to one last movement. This is, with the “weapon-vehicle” contraction and the cybernatization of the system, the volumetric reduction of military objects: miniaturization.» (1)
 

My reflection starts exactly from here: despite the invention of an expansive device, bunkers have revealed themselves to be ineffectual; their profoundly modern characters amounting only to a wish. Today, they have become aesthetic objects, by all means a form of «simulacrum so close to children’s playful warring... after the real warring. » (2) Over half century after the end of WW2, they seem to have been reabsorbed by the landscape, detritus of a growing urbanization that is not capable of assimilating them, aside for some rare attempts at museologizing them, or for some forms of “dark tourism”. (3) The bunker is a ruin that resists any speculative programme. It constantly appears to be asking for attention or presence; but upon attempting to approach it, we get forced back. The bunker refuses any kind of long-term plan, favoring only short-lived, occasional and unforeseeable moments.