Jenny Perlin

I started traveling to meet people living underground in former missile silos and munitions bunkers in the American Midwest after the 2016 U.S. elections. It seemed a necessary way to try revisit and reclaim some of my own upbringing. I knew there was more to the place than the way the media portrayed it. And I wanted to travel alone, to go “home” and experience the otherness I always felt growing up in southwestern Ohio.

Twenty years of living in Brooklyn had gotten a little boring. I wasn’t used to being agreed with so often and knew my left-leaning friends who had stayed in the Midwest were working harder than ever to maintain and support the causes they held dear. For whatever perverse reason, I missed the sense of alienation that had once tormented me as a young person. The adrenaline of the unknown.

There are three Bunker Films so far. Two of the films are portraits of people; one is a portrait of a company doing brisk business crafting new underground shelters for wealthy clientele. A fourth film, about a country-wide chain of several collective shelters, is in the editing phase.

People ask me why I make these trips alone and how I can deal with spending days and nights underground talking with strange men who like to declaim their philosophies for hours on end. In short, I suppose that talking to others allows for a kind of dissolution that I find both satisfying and strange. As the conversation continues, it’s not that I agree with their perspective, but that their person-ness is present before me, and in the context in which they are speaking, it is simply logical that what they are saying comes out of them. Only later, usually as I’m transcribing the interview, does it hit me where I’ve been. But by then, the empathy is there too, all mixed in.

— Jenny Perlin, April 2020