Bunk'Art: staging the past and present of Albania's nuclear bunkers

Abstract

This chapter explores nuclear cultural heritage using, as an entry point, encounters with socialist nuclear bunkers. Focusing on the cases of Bunk'Art 1 and Bunk'Art 2 in Tirana, Albania, it investigates how Cold War defensive infrastructures have been transformed into immersive museum experiences. In analysing these cases, the chapter critiques top-down approaches that frame this atomic cultural heritage as an unwanted past, reshaped into sites of dark tourism that aestheticise violence and reduce the historical specificity of Albanian socialism to a consumable narrative of trauma. Drawing on Huyssen's concept of “present pasts”, the chapter argues that these museal forms reflect contemporary anxieties and political needs, shaping memory through spectacle rather than critical engagement. In response, the chapter considers how a more open, polyvocal, and situated engagement with the material remains of nuclear and socialist infrastructure might facilitate what Robertson calls a “heritage from below.” Although nuclear cultural heritage is often treated as a relic of a distant past, the chapter proposes that its reinterpretation through local and creative practices offers possibilities for critical memory work and knowledge production oriented not only towards the past, but also towards alternative futures.

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ORCID for Dimitra Gkitsa: orcid.org/0000-0003-3681-6047

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