The Culture Bunker

HD Video, 10:15, 2019

 

The Culture Bunker unfolds as a video diary shot by an amateur urban explorer documenting an excursion to a forgotten WWII-era bunker on the green outskirts of Augsburg—now paved over and used as a factory parking lot. What begins as a routine urbex video quickly spirals into something stranger, as he stumbles upon a suddenly abandoned archaeological site, littered with broken equipment, shallow trenches, and unmarked graves.

At first, the protagonist treats the discovery as content—filming, narrating, speculating, trying to insert himself into the mystery. He speaks directly to the camera like a live-streamer chasing views (although he has precious little to say), but as the footage progresses, his tone shifts. Strange sounds interrupt his voice-overs. Whether out of ignorance or anxiety, his narration becomes increasingly fractured, tangled in half-remembered history, ghost stories, and wild theories.

The bunker becomes a kind of geological cross-section: bronze-age fragments buried beneath WW2 concrete, ancient royals pressed under asphalt. The mundane use of the site today—a car park—sits obscenely atop of it all. And somewhere in this collapse of time-lines, something seems to stir. The explorer’s presence, his probing, his need to explain and narrate, appears to animate the dead.

What emerges is a loose (ghost) story on how history is unearthed, labeled, and distorted. The protagonist is a stand-in for the impulse to catalogue the past without really understanding it. As the film progresses, it becomes unclear whether the ghosts he awakens are literal, metaphorical, or hallucinated—products of guilt, ignorance, or simply too much time spent online.

Direction, Animation, Sound Design and Editing:
Rustan Söderling