I, the insentient. Stand before 1000 suns.

If there is a fascination with the inanimate, it would be of its three dimensional aspect of a fixed, yet lifeless form and through the human imagination, given life.  A purpose. Which holds a significance that is our self centered viewpoint of reality.  In all of our hopes and fears, while used to establish that reasoning for human motivation.   Such were the Nevada ‘nuke’ test site mannequins of 1955, when the American military tested Atomic Bombs and were commissioned to build mock towns in and around test sites to assess the aftereffects of a nuclear detonation.   Streets were lined with telegraph poles, gardens and houses with families residing inside, all to represent of what was deemed, in its ironic conception, the Nuclear Family of the 1950s, except they were plastic mannequins, dressed and styled to reflect the everyday American household of a new decade.

Yet, this assembly line of prefabrication to which the mannequin had been created from, was within a dawn of the nuclear age, a hope of technological freedom that also ensured the fear of complete destruction from nuclear annihilation.  These configurations, in their feigned normality, held an absurdity of its function, as though their azoic appearances were mocking us, their biological creators.    As they willingly face the ultimate weapon.  Their faces smiling, expressions hopeful all the while awaiting the flash of detonation, the splitting of the atom and the intense heat of a thousand suns, laying wait for the final impact of a destructive wave, as it obliterates all that stand before it.

Limbs torn off, faces melted, remnants of the plastic mannequins, strewn around test sites.   A lounge room of where a mannequin family once sat, destroyed, its walls caved in, windows smashed.  Bodies of what were once smartly dressed mannequins are scattered throughout a devastated landscape and to the observer these plastic replicas of human beings might seem pathetic, displayed in their peculiar and unnatural angles.  But, through the insentient, they portray an unintentional resilience to the extremity of violence.   A gracefulness in all of its surreality, unperturbed, in the wake of a weapon that is truly “the destroyer of worlds”.         

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Words: A.Glass (2021)

Images: Nevada Nuclear testsite mannequins (1955)