Immediately absence lodged itself in my brain I thought of an image from the exhibition ‘Conflict Time Photography’ that I saw in the Tate Modern in 2015. It’s a powerful exhibition, looking back at conflict, challenging itself to consider the past ‘without becoming frozen in the process.’ One image stuck in my mind. It’s a photograph by Chloe Dewe Mathews of a place, Six Farm, Loker, West-Vlaanderen. It’s in black and white, taken on a misty morning, and it shows only a meadow, a tree, a gate and a hedge. It was taken 99 years after three British soldiers were shot for desertion in this place during the first world war: Private Joseph Byers, Private Andrew Evans and Private George E Collins. It was part of a series ‘Shot at Dawn’ . This uninhabited image of a very ordinary place conjured these men and the injustice of their executions very vividly. The ghosts of the past came to life to tell their stories.
AWE Burghfield is or likely will be inhabited by the ghosts of the future. This is the place that will make and maintain nuclear warheads that could kill countless thousands of people and pollute environments – other places - for generations. And the people killed, like those British soldiers of the past, will be executed in an act of retaliation not justice. They will not be those responsible for future wars. They will probably be urban citizens of one nation bombed because their ruling elite have attacked the vulnerable population of another nation. So when we come to conceive and enact a protest at AWE, we might register and respect the ghosts of the future. True to the ethos of the ASB and affected by the absence of my fellow academics, I imagine the place inhabited by all those involved in teaching and research in the future, beings from the world over, an academia of all people and every place. How, though, might we represent those murdered people and blighted places? In shadows like those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; in chalked outlines like murder victims; in words read over uninhabited quotidian images – and what would these words be? (‘leave the room buried for future generations’). Could we represent the ghosts of the future being fashioned at AWE by inserting books into such images, or by hanging pictures of other places in the razor wire surrounding the factory…