The Fall
I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a pick-up truck. Between me and the man driving, the long barrel of a shotgun is leaning against the seat. Around us, the grass has turned yellow in the dry heat. Bunkers are scattered across the fields, their spacious bellies hidden below ground level. “I’m alive and you’re dead,” I think as I drive past the world’s largest survival community.
The place is infested by rattlesnakes. It’s a gated community, but some bunker owners nonetheless choose to erect barbed wire fences around their properties, too. Despite the snakes and the isolation, people claim to feel safe here, safer, in fact, than they felt in their previous homes in Minnesota, California or Arizona.
Journal entry:
4 September 2022.
Edgemont, South Dakota, USA.
Giulia Mangione
Giulia Mangione was born in Italy in 1987 and lives and works in Oslo. Working with text, film and images, she spends extended periods of time documenting alternative societies: from a hippie collective in Tuscany, to the fleeting community developing during a 6-day journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
For The Fall, she traveled from Patmos in Greece via La Palma in the Canary Islands, to the West Coast of the United States. On what she calls “a photographic road trip towards the apocalypse”, she visited people who in various ways prepare for potentially catastrophic events, from survival experts to bunker dwellers and so-called doomsday preppers – people who prepare for judgment day.
The result is an almost poetic exploration of landscape and people, traces and points towards the future, where the commonality is our shared quest for unity and community.