The true eye of the earth is water
— Gaston Bachelard

PʲI͡ƜɡƜ͡INʲII̯

Images are atoms of human attention. They combine to form molecules which, together, constitute the atmosphere of a culture. While particular arrangements of these molecules are experienced as discrete objects, they are nothing of the sort, but complexes. One should speak of the identity of an island-complex, just as one should a painting, in terms of density, dynamics, and stability. The cultural space is a continuum of complexes as atmospheric conditions. We are always immersed. Sometimes we float, suspended within a specific condition for years, taking local equilibrium for a universal composition. Sometimes we swim.

Pikinni

Bikini lies beyond the forty-eight-hour delivery rule. A global network of cars, trains, and airplanes can only get you to the dock at Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, before an ocean journey must begin. There is no ferry, and only one suitable vessel is available for charter—the Windward, a beaten-up pearl diver from the 1970s. Once you have concluded negotiations with its owner you can embark, entering a parenthesis in your life; a capsule, outside time and phone signal. Out in the wide Pacific, flows of energy run up against the beam, tipping the boat from side to side, constantly, in the spell it takes for you to become a sailor. The passage is an initiation, or sickness, that finally breaks with sunrise and first sight of land.

The island is a line of green floating on a raft of yellow sand, a shock of luminous color like a gem set within another—the lagoon. It is a picture of the good as a geographical figure, so related in brochures promising space beyond the metropolitan everyday. You cannot help but recognize it as a place you have wanted, a figure centrally located in a dream that is our culture.

It is only after fully indulging this reflex that your gaze steadies. For the last seventy years, it has been a veritable ghostland. Between 1946 and 1958, twenty-three of the most powerful human-made explosions in history, delivering a combined fission yield of 42.2 megatons, occurred here. The force of one of these, Castle Bravo, was enough to vaporize three islands and gouge a massive crater—measuring 800 meters in diameter—out of the primordial reef. Another threw a fleet of captured and decommissioned World War II battleships—some of them more than 250 meters long—up into the air. A few were ripped to shreds. Others, like the USS Saratoga and the HIJMS Nagato—storied flagships of the United States and Japanese navies—eventually sank to the bottom, where their rusting hulks remain. During this period, obliterated geology would become radioactive particles, carried on the wind to then fall on communities in neighboring atolls. Meanwhile, the people of Bikini, who had been asked to “temporarily” leave their home to make way for a series of experiments disingenuously ventured “for the good of mankind and to end all wars,” began to learn the meaning of a dispossession that continues until present. Today, the atoll bears architectural scars that stand as profane registers of this program, and its unresolved consequences—a series of concrete bunkers, jutting out from the shore. A terminal beach.

The Bomb

There is a photograph of the atoll taken in 1946. It was created on Bikini Island, from a position overlooking the lagoon. In the foreground, a few architectural forms are followed by a row of palms, then the land ends. But you don’t notice any of this at first. Instead, your attention is drawn to a cumulonimbus filling much of the frame, sitting atop a giant column, rising up from the water’s surface into the sky. This is not a naturally occurring cloud, but the fruit of human experiment. It is an extraordinary image: the world’s first hydrogen bomb, captured mid-explosion during the Baker shot. The strangeness of this picture intensifies the more you look at it: While the terrible violence of the nuclear reaction, ripping molecules apart, unfolds on the horizon, it has yet to affect the place where the photograph was taken. During the click of the camera’s shutter, and not a second longer, the island still experiences calm: the leaves of its trees unmoved by wind; not a grain of sand out of place on the beach. A last moment of peace.

But there is more. Atop the water’s skin, positioned in consecutive rings that ripple outwards from the column, numerous silhouettes announce an armada. Battleships, all of them, anchored at various distances from the epicenter to settle a disagreement between the navy and the air force concerning how such behemoths might hold up in the face of a blast. The shadow of these vessels throw the magnitude of the cloud into relief: at 264 meters long, the largest of them, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, appears utterly dwarfed. Beyond this, it is the register of an outrageous power that stirs the mind: At the bottom right of the column, the 171-meter USS Arkansas is being sucked up into the sky. You can only imagine the moment afterwards: a fiery wind and an atomic tsunami, overturning the palms, washing the beach away, scattering ships like so much flotsam.

In 1968, the Apollo 8 Astronaut William Anders would capture the whole Earth in a photograph. Some have claimed that this picture, which was distributed worldwide on magazine pages and TV screens, helped to spur broader understanding of the planet as a single system, bolstering the nascent environmentalist movement. But if Earthrise, as the picture has come to be known, was the birth of a new mass-cultural relation to ecology, the US Department of Energy’s documentation of Baker was its birth pang: For the image of a jewel-like planet, suspended in space, to contribute to the urgency of conservation initiatives, there had to be a prior vision of the stakes involved. Photographs of Baker are that vision. One of immense tumult, wrought by man on the scale of earthquakes and hurricanes; an exponential increase in our species’ capacity to destroy; a hazard raised to the all-encompassing dimensions of clouds and oceans—climate itself.

At the time of the Able and Baker tests, eighteen tons of cinematography equipment and more than half the world’s supply of film stock was present at Bikini; every bomb photographed and filmed from a multitude of angles. While much of this effort served an analytic enterprise on the part of military scientists and engineers, it also had a propaganda function. It was in the Marshall Islands that the nuclear blast as an image-project reached its apogee: a performance writ large, attended by a huge public relations machine. This aspect of Operation Crossroads rendered one of the most remote places in the world the most photographed. In this light, just as one talks about the science of the bombs, or the testing of warheads at Bikini, one must also talk about the manipulation of the global visual imaginary—deploying pictures as munitions.

But in order to shoot, the camera had to take on a new dimension. The array of concrete housings that it would leave behind on white-sand beaches stand as the ruins of a studio apparatus dedicated to producing visions of a new world order. Bikini’s modern trauma—its culture exiled, its land blasted, vaporized in places, burned and irradiated—issued from the desire to create an atomic iconography. A dense cloud of images resulted from the explosions there, particles of which continue to circulate, today, constitutive of our cultural atmosphere. As we float within them, it bears remembering that, in the geopolitical Cold War, what was cold was only the surface of the pages and screens that bore the sign of the mushroom cloud. Bikini burned hotter than anything before.

Bikini

The skiff pulls up at a short jetty, running out from a beach of the most refined sand one might ever hope to see. The word “unspoiled” immediately springs to mind: not a single thing floating in the water, gentle waves lapping at the shore. The brightness is phenomenal.

Penny, the Windward’s first mate, a heavy-set Tahitian with a quiet demeanor, has radioed ahead and we are met by a pickup truck full of five young guys who, we will later understand, are nearly all of the island’s current inhabitants. Our skiff isn’t just loaded with camera gear but also cool-boxes full of frozen steak, tinned food, and beer for them—a necessary courtesy if you call in here, a kind of exchange for the use of their vehicle and its precious, limited fuel. Once loaded, we drive along a straight road flanked on each side by coconut groves for a half a kilometer or so, until we reach the geographical center of the Bikinian nation. It is a cul-de-sac, no more than ten small buildings, many of them clearly disused. A few are utilities, seemingly offices or sheds, as well as a tin building full of machine parts with a sign hanging above its door inscribed with the statement, “We can fix anything, except a broken heart.” On the left, a fence surrounds a small parcel of land containing a few graves and palms.

The island is narrow, like all the others that make up the atoll, and most of the buildings are situated directly on the waterfront. To our left, the architecture looks familiar. There is a gazebo with a bar underneath it and a few uniform bungalows on the edge of the sand—the remains of a defunct diving resort. The venture was an attempt to establish an economic motor here, one that might eventually allow the island to support a more representative proportion of the Bikinian people. Its core customer base was to be dive tourists and their families. And it worked, for a minute, before coming to a quick halt. The atoll’s remoteness, compounded by the incredible unreliability of the national airline, which frequently left guests stranded for weeks onsite, as well as the misgivings that many holiday planners had about visiting a nuclear blast zone, made it untenable. Nobody wants their child to make sandcastles out of radioactive sand. And that was it. Now, like the rest of the town, the resort’s buildings stare down an inexorable march towards becoming driftwood.

Almost everything here is in limbo: a confection or a stopgap. The buildings that aren’t rotten are on life support. The best kept is a diesel-run “power plant” administered by the US Department of Energy, which supplies electricity to the other buildings. The main function of these buildings is to house the workers who take care of the plant. That, and a few unnecessary streetlights, as well as the resort’s air conditioning system. It is the simulacrum of a town: a mise en abyme of utility. Given that they rotate on and off of the island only once, for a period of six months, and mostly never return, the few persons residing here ­constitute placeholders in lieu of any settled community. In a kind of birthright scheme, Bikinian youngsters based in Majuro, and elsewhere, apply for a tour of duty, the only chance most of them will ever have to encounter their homeland. It is a kind of privilege to get selected.

At least in terms of their official mission, those who pass through perform a minimal image of inhabitation—“keeping things running”—according to a desiccated economic, industrial, and spatial outline: putting diesel in the generator. Witnessing their honest attempt to work with the thin script that they have been handed, to keep this place human and maintain a fragile edifice of occupation in the face of staggering dispossession—effected by their people’s enforced exodus—does nothing to foreclose an impression of failure. It’s sad. One of the most beautiful places on Earth, struck through with an unshakable sense of inertia. And yet, without the aporia of the generator, this vortex of colonial infrastructure, there would be no birthright travel at all: No fishing on an ancestral beach. No swimming. No boxes of fish to address to relatives back in Majuro, for us to carry back with us. We take the packages and promise that they will be delivered.

…

Instant coffee as the sun climbs above the water, its rays casting an optimistic glow over the morning. The night’s fog beginning to lift, we discuss the possibility of returning, someday, and filling the resort with friends. We decide to walk around the town, to check out the mechanical depot and houses. Opposite the former, there are three steel shipping containers that have been welded together to comprise a makeshift building, above whose doorway a sign is mounted that reads “King Juda Memorial Laboratory.” Juda was the last leader of the Bikinians to reside here, the man who agreed to nuclear exodus, pressured into accepting the notion that his people should leave their ancestral home “for the good of mankind and to end all wars.” Here, in symbolic exchange for acquiescence to the greatest of geophysical experiments, stands his hollow recognition, as if his capitulation inaugurated a new age of scientific enterprise for his nation; as if, rather than marking a future of dispossession, participation in the nuclear project would secure the Bikinians a path towards the world’s intellectual-industrial big table. The cipher for this putative legacy, out of sight from the rest of the world, and crumbling away in front of our eyes, is nothing more than a shell—open to the elements, empty, and in no better condition than the rusting oil drums nearby. The “laboratory,” some kind of gift from the United States, was a lie. A lie so badly told, and without effort, that its offense issues as much from contempt for its audience as for the truth itself. An untended falsehood. A perjury, disgracing science and humanity—rotting away at the center of an excuse for a society, in a place that once was; an empty concession, offered without care, and immediately forgotten.

Airok

The zodiac approaches Airok. As we enter the shallows, Penny points out a small black tip, right off the port rail, and another shark of about a meter in length that is almost luminous yellow in color. Nearby, between tangles of rusting metal and pipes, there are giant clam shells. But none of these strange milestones hold our attention for long. There it is: a huge bunker, lying right on the beach at the waterline, as if it had washed ashore in a storm. Waves of erosion look to have opened up a cavity beneath it on one side, such that half of its base is now an overhang, resembling a brutalist cantilever. As we circle a little, looking for a place to anchor, its back comes into view. There, jammed between the cantilever and another elevated slab of concrete, is a massive plug of pulverized coral, recalling limestone from the Jurassic period. This material conjunction is strange, but its twisted logic soon becomes apparent: during an almost unimaginably powerful explosion, billions of particles were pushed into motion, flying through the sky before smashing into it with such intensity that they were forced into a compound: squeezed into stone.

On the beach, now facing it head-on. This was a filming station, housing cameras to document the size and shape of mushroom clouds, so that each blast might be analyzed, so that bigger and better bombs might be brought into the world. With its four eye-like openings, the structure resembles a giant skull—a totem for an alien religion. Beneath them, a gaping doorway beckons. The Geiger counter objects a little more than it did when we were on the boat, but not too much, so in we go. Rust and slime. It is like the inside of a mollusk. Stalactites of calcite drip from the ceiling and flaking rebar pokes out from the walls and up from the floor. Throughout, a rushing sound reverberates: we are listening to the sea, in a shell.

Once back outside, we reflect on the meaning of the structure, whose hulking form now takes on a new valence—not just a building, but a camera body. The photo negative has always been an invertebrate, reliant on an exoskeleton. It is as if, at the birth of the atomic age, it outgrew its shell: in order to capture the image of the bomb, its housing had to scale up to the dimension of battlements. In the manner of a hermit crab, it had to leave its old armor and crawl into the space of architecture. In fact, architectural symptoms are standard mutations precipitated by atomic enterprise. There is no atomic technology without the development of special facilities, built of super-strength materials, and so on. The nuclear entails an envelope that reflects its colossal power.

…

Crater

Daybreak. Our wakeup call, the same as every day, is a holler from the galley—loud enough to cut through our earplugs and shake us away from sleep. We fall out of our bunks and fly up the ladder, into coffee and plates of scrambled eggs, before heading out onto deck to check the swell. On the way out the door, Brendan says Trump has won.

It’s light, and our torpor abates as we spy today’s site: Castle Bravo, the biggest anthropogenic crater in the world, a circle of sand two kilometers across whose center is another lagoon. The result of an almost laughable miscalculation, Bravo was two and a half times more powerful than expected, delivering an explosion of fifteen megatons, leaving the scar that we are here to visit. As the caffeine kicks in, we are reminded that this means diving it.

Bravo seems like a place that you should never visit, a place that does not belong in any positive sense to anyone. It is one of the few places that might be happily erased from the memory of the Earth. Staring it down, like every other fright we’ve gone to meticulous lengths to encounter on this expedition, we only have ourselves to blame. No one forced us here. Sometimes you get what you wish for. We put on our gear, more carried along by the group dynamic than anything like enthusiasm. And yet, in the face of our reluctance, a dawn starts to break, more exquisite than any other so far on this trip: the sea is flat and mirror like; the sky free of clouds and without wind. As the morning comes on, we’re given to understand why the Pacific has its name. Now, fully geared up, everything seems a little better. And without needing to put together an enhanced dive plan for deco, our spirits are doubly improved. We get into the zodiac, cameras in hand, and chart a course a few hundred meters into the epicenter.

The thing that normally springs to mind when you imagine a lagoon is turquoise water and a shallow, yellow, sandy bottom: the fish bowl experience, that cliché image sold in tourist brochures. But after the green almost-open-water current attending the Saratoga and Nagato, we’ve come to expect otherwise. As we throw ourselves backwards over the edge and into the crater, the situation immediately surprises. Eyelids unclenched after the splash, the water is suffused with a vivid luminosity, almost blinding bright as the sun bounces off the internal parabola of the crater, concentrating in its center like the flash of a camera stilled in time.

The bottom is soft and welcoming, its sand incredibly fine. Was it bleached by the explosion? Apart from not being in possession of an underwater Geiger counter, everything is perfect. In any case, worrying about radiation is, counterintuitively, a bit fanciful. The water here has been constantly changing over the last seven decades, passing in and out of the great surrounding ocean. All this time, local radioactive particles have been picked up and carried along for hundreds of miles before sinking into deep currents and spreading throughout the globe. A bit of Bravo might be just as easily found in Antarctica, Australia, or anywhere else, for that matter. In fact, marine microbiologists all over the world use the presence of its isotopes to establish a baseline when dating their samples. Today, we are not diving a crater but the central gear of a clock.

There are small fish here. Shrimps too, and hermit crabs. Everywhere, there is movement. We imagined a desert and we find the opposite. Instead of a dead zone, the caldera is alive. For all of its reputation as contaminated, Bikini is also a kind of marine park. The proscription afforded by its nuclear past has meant that coral has been left free to return, unassailed by trawlers, dynamite, or pollutants.

A clang—the sound of a knife hitting a tank. A call for attention. We swivel to find out why and there, right behind us, are two grey reef sharks that have been approaching unseen by all of us except John. We turn to face them, as you must always look a shark in the eye. They continue to approach before turning sharply away on the perpendicular, just a few meters out, to give us a full view of their size. Then they head back the way they came, before once again repeating the challenge. It is a little too close for comfort. We gather closer together, as if to suggest that we’re one large creature, defiantly blowing bubbles to show them, we hope, who is in control of the space. They circle us, perhaps to demonstrate that we’re trapped, or to push us more tightly together, into a human bait ball. There’s nothing to do but keep moving, though, as we have our objective—to shoot the steepest part of the crater cone—and it is not here. So we continue our swim, each one of us turning around regularly, so that our group has no tail—eyes everywhere. Later, John tells us that the greys were being territorial, like dogs, and that they saw us more as competitors than lunch.

Once we’ve exited their stalking grounds, the sharks lose interest and we can turn our attention back to the general scene. As we swim in the direction of the slope, tracking the bottom, we encounter pinnacles of coral sticking out of the sand, randomly, like so many stones in a Japanese garden. Each of them seems to function as its own microcosmos, orbited by tiny fish. Against the shocking turquoise they almost look like they might be features in an aquarium. Strange. It is as if the crater served as a barrier, protecting the waters within, establishing a new test site—a biological petri dish on an even gradient. Despite once being the epicenter of a fission bomb blast, seventy years of human absence has allowed the reef to regenerate, fusing human-made landscape and the will of the sea.

Arkansas

The days and nights pass, one after the other. The routine: gearing up, jumping in, sinking, equalizing, breathing, ascending, emerging, resting, then jumping back in again; long walks across the sand; or shuffling through jungle with crates strapped to our backs, lugging gear through Pandanus groves, walking atop generations of palm fronds; attending concrete temples.

At the bottom of the lagoon, you are staring up at the inverted bow of the dreadnought USS Arkansas—which looks like the gigantic dorsal fin of a behemoth, something between machine and animal, a tower, or the face of a mountain. Its powerful figure rises against a color field of dark blue. But this optical minimalism is no void. It is completely full, a dynamic volume that pushes against you, around you. Every part of this volume is in motion, and there is no way to take a fixed position. You can’t stand and meditate. You’re being pulled all over the place. You have to fight to approach the wreck. If you manage, on first sight the broad outline of its figure might seem simple or rationalized. But in detail, it is another teaming hive of life: things are crawling over it, growing out of it, circling it, moving in and out of it, hiding behind it, and nestling within its cracks.

To look at it, you have to breathe in a certain way, to control your body as much as respire. To get here and look at it you have to squeeze into a second skin, strap on weights, bite down on a hose, and trust in a material outsourcing of your lungs. You have to study a system and follow it; believing that you are ready to approach the scene. You have to cast off from a lifeworld you know, and commit yourself to another space, its atmosphere, understanding that you cannot stay. It is more than any artwork has ever asked of you. More than any church you know about. It is the greatest installation in the world. It wasn’t put here to be loved or looked at. It was put here to be forgotten.

You’re looking at one of the largest human constructions ever offered in sacrifice. Think of the mythos that this object encapsulates—how it enchanted industrial creation. Think of the hundreds of people whose labor served to manufacture it, and beyond them, the millions more mobilized in its service. All of this is implicated here, in this object, a vessel in the truest sense of the word, containing the will of its creators. Think of the will of the vanquished, also, obtaining in the Nagato and the others, likewise given up to a tumult of fire and fury. These vessels, too, along with a whole way of life that had no stake in such enterprise, rendered unto a victory ritual of an entirely modern order: the experiment.

Today we parse the bones in what must be considered an underwater museum. If it is not a museum then it is nothing at all. And if it is nothing then we have not learned, and Bikini never mattered. But it mattered to them. And if Bikini doesn’t matter to us, then how can we be sure that anything we attempt ever can? This museum is a place without labels, and minimal onsite interpretation. Its sole guardian is George, the only Bikinian equipped to enter it, and he is employed ad hoc. Here, sixty meters down from the impression that all is sunny, is an atrocity exhibition, gathering together the insane cult objects of the world’s leading industrial powers. It is underexposed—almost lost—and that is what is crazy about it.

Bereft of true resettlement and attention, Bikini is asleep. And through its sleep, the outlines of our present blur, as if we are dreaming. Few will ever visit these ships and so their resonances are unfelt. But they comprise a museum. This, we assert. And every museum presupposes a public, as witness, who, through attending, become a community. Without visitors, a museum cannot shape identity, that locus of care and thought. A lost exhibition hardly exists at all. Though named an essential part of the world’s heritage, Bikini’s wrecks are, in practice, a private collection—less accessible than the most exclusive vernissage. Against the very concept of public good, their display is only available to a few. This is one of the most significant exhibitions ever opened. No one was invited, and hardly anyone knows about it.

We should raise these ships and deposit them on the famous squares of the world—Trafalgar, Concorde, the Washington Mall—like beached whales. We should haul up these rotten tokens of a civilization we have yet to overcome. What is unrealistic about hoisting the wrecks of Bikini lagoon, transporting them across the globe and installing them at the center of our leading nation states at a cost of billions of dollars? What is impractical about burning fuel enough to power the armada it would take to carry them back? How is any of this expenditure, pollution, and effort unrealistic compared to the power and waste effected during their genesis—not to mention their sacrifice? Comparatively speaking, it is a modest proposal.

But we can’t bring the ships back. And while it is obvious that there is no medium capable of capturing the experience of encountering them here, in the lagoon, we must try. At the end of the world and a journey deeper than we ever imagined, we float, facing sights that nearly defy our powers of comprehension, to say nothing of representation. Can we fix them in an image? No. It is clear that any attempt to place this reality in a single reckoning is doomed. There is no frame big enough.

In this atoll, reverie flows like water. One image leads to another: a photograph leads to a film; a film leads to a book; a journey leads to a story—that we tell once, twice, again and again; at the bar; after dinner; to anyone who will listen. Sometimes the currents are navigable, moving in and out of the lagoon: a tide pulls us out into the past, that ocean of what has come. Another carries us into days that have yet to be, and all that we want to say. But there are also vortices, orbiting a mass of dreaming as dense as a planet, here at the center of the atoll. In them, our images move. People recognize the signs but don’t know what we mean. We say Pikinni. Bikini. And people answer, Yes. We promise something clear, but it is nothing of the sort. Adrift, we can only embrace the current, heading forward into the past, and backwards into the future. In this tide there is no swimming for shore. Bikini. Pʲi͡ɯɡɯ͡inʲii̯—we never left your lagoon. The truth of our drift is submerged, somewhere in the South Pacific. Deep, past gun turrets and propellers, over the edge of a hull, beyond the monstrous hulk of a battleship, amid a column of seawater, running over coral sand, out into the blue. It is a tide containing us. Witnesses. Image makers—as we used to float.

This text is excerpted from: Nadim Samman and Julian Charrière, As We Used to Float: Within Bikini Atoll. Berlin: K.Verlag, 2018. ISBN: 978-3-947858-00-2

Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist living and working in Berlin. Addressing pressing matters of ecological concern, his work invites critical reflection upon cultural traditions of perceiving, representing, and engaging with the natural world.

Nadim Samman is a curator and art historian with a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is currently Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Please cite as: Charrière, J and N Samman (2022) As We Used to Float. Within Bikini Atoll (extract). In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/sxek-cq63