SAVING THE LIVING
VIVOS X POINT RESIDENCY 2017 - 2020
“If there is a pandemic, nobody can come in. Period.
And you pray that everybody that is here…that there is not somebody that
is already in, that’s infected. Some of
the pandemic scenarios that have occurred in the past where you wipe out a
hundred million people in a planet that is not nearly as populated nor as
mobile as what we have today….those are frightening. A pandemic can be a bad, bad thing…with the
level of mobility we have today you can have something spread across the planet
in a week”.
TOM SOULSBY, VIVOS X POINT PIONEER
After having my son, I have a powerful instinct to get away from society, from technology, and from observation. My primal response led me to look for land that I could inhabit, inexpensively or for free, where I can also take my dog.
There was some free land in Pitcairn in the Easter Islands, some cheap and probably fake farms in Bulgaria and Romania on EBay that I could afford at a push – but most of the possibilities for homesteading were in the United States of America.
The Gods move their chess pieces like in Jason and the Argonauts and Robert Vicino is put in my path. A Californian real estate agent who ‘had a vision to save as many people’ as he could after a near death experience, Vicino had set about converting cold war bunkers and ammunition silos into ‘a Noah’s Ark’ that made provision for humans and non-humans alike in multiple disaster scenarios (that is my dog, taken care of).
The grandeur of Vicino’s vision appealed to me. The sites are architecturally beautiful and in remote or inaccessible locations across America, Germany, and South Korea. Vivos appeared to offer the perfect metaphorical example of total power, being a self-exiled colony, a sanctuary, a potential prison; the perfect heterotopic model. I had thought of them as an eccentricity, an act of paranoia, in grandiose landscapes like those I yearned for and a great exhibition space. They were in fact deeply prescient of what was about to happen.
By the side of a pool in a cheap hotel in Hollywood in 2017, I ask Vicino to make me artist in residence and give me a bunker to make work in. He generously offered me a bunker at Vivos X Point, which is an archipelago of ex military ammunition silos in South Dakota. There are 575 bunkers here in various states of disrepair and conversion and there is a community of people involved in making this fictional landscape more real.
Two years after meeting Vicino for the first time, I am 6 months pregnant with my daughter Juno but I decide to travel to the site because it will be my last chance before the birth. At that time, the Earth had not yet stood still and flights were still open.
By the time the WHO had confirmed COVID-19 was a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the X Point pioneers had already retreated to their bunkers.