ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, the Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce imagined the “end” via a plastic bunker titled The Period of Great Contaminations (1971-1972) and an accompanying fictional archaeological report. Supposedly, human and architectural remnants of a concealed city buried deep underground had been discovered. Far from the dreamy artificial environments of atomic shelters, the installation drew a parallel between two spaces of beginnings and endings: the cave and the bunker. This chapter suggests that Pesce’s underground dwelling staged a paradoxical temporality of concealment that was both pre- and post-historical and uncovered what was meant to be concealed; underground protection is only effective if it remains hidden. By depicting the inhabitants of the bunker through a rapprochement of humans and animals, Pesce captured the emerging instability of human subjectivity in the post-war period. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that interrogating the underground’s concealing function, as The Period of Great Contaminations did, offers much more in terms of interpretations of the subterranean realm than the mere techno-fix solution that atomic shelters epitomized.
