Archis 2010 #3

Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-LAB + MoonLife...

A Quick Getaway Lanzarote as a Surrogate Moon

Caspar Frenken and Tom Vandeputte

'As our track wriggles through the moonscape, the top of the large mansion of Torrecilla de Domingo comes into view, gradually exposing itself as we come alongside cultivated plots and keep left at a junction just before meeting the main road.' Lanzarote Discovery Walking Guide 'Lanzarote is the most eastern of the Canary Islands. It is an impressive island because of the unique moonscape ...' Neckermann Travels

In travel guides and tourist brochures , the island of Lanzarote is presented as an Earthly place that most closely resembles the Moon. The Lonely Planet describes its volcanic landscape in its list of Planet Earth's Most Unearthly Landscapes as an 'extraordinary moonscape' and speaks of the 'lunar wonders' of the island; the Globetrotter travel guide stresses that the pervasive 'comparisons with the surface of the moon are not too far-fetched' and emphasizes that the island's ' moon-like landscape [ ... ] is a must for any visitor'; and the Rough Guide to Lanzarote's assurance that 'the well-worn cliche' of Lanzarote's resemblance with the Moon 'rings so true ... that you may have the words "one small step, one giant leap" buzzing your brain all the way' not only testifies of the validity of this claim but also of its ubiquity. The 'lunar landscape' of Lanzarote's national park, Timanfaya, is only accessible through a guided bus tour where the overture of 2001: A Space Odyssey - Strauss' 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' - provides an unambiguously suggestive soundtrack to the view over the landscape.' The bus follows a set route over a winding path designed to keep tourist buses out of each other's sight and sustain the illusion of an untrod den landscape as much as possible. The path determines the points where one can leave the tourist buses in order to observe (or rather photograph) the landscape from an array of still points of view which, effectively suggests an experience of the area as a discrete sequence of stage sets. This staging of the visitor's experience to a series of photo moments demonstrates the awareness that , only in the abstraction of a photographic image, Lanzarote is able to approximate

the experience of the lunar landscape. The only substantial built object in the area, Cesar Manrique's joint restaurant and observation post, significantly appears as an alien object that has descended on top of one of the peaks. In Manrique's house, the main tourist attraction after the Timanfaya bus tour that is located on the edge of the volcanic landscape, a deep spaceship-like window with round corners suggestively frames the prominent view over the landscape,2demonstrating a similar awareness of architecture's capacity to generate narratives and an appreciation of Lanzarote's surface, which appears to be just as fertile to project fictions upon as the Moon used to be before humans first set foot on it ..3 The particular description of Lanzarote's inlands as a moonscape appeared as early as 1962 in printed form in a travel report titled ' Lanzarote: The Odd Island', which was published in The Atlantic Monthly, and mentioned the island's 'stark, uninhabited lunar landscape'.4In actual fact, however, Lanzarote's inlands do not share their geological origins with the landscape of the Moon. Its particular landscape is the result of six years of exceptionally violent volcanic eruptions that covered almost a third of the island's surface with a thick layer of lava in the early eighteenth century, replacing a landscape of farmland and villages with lava fields and volcanic peaks. In an attempt to authorize its description as 'moonscape' in other than geological terms , popular literature and tourist guides claim that the area around Timanfaya the point where according to a Spanish priest's record of the catastrophic events. 'the earth suddenly opened' on the first of September 17301;1 - has figured as the

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- - -b';;;;:kcj,ropfor feature films situated on the Moon, as an

actual testing ground for a Moon buggy, and as a training location for NASA astronauts, effectively putting forward the concept of Lanzarote as a terrestrial surrogate for the Moon. tl In the 19605 - the same period in which the tourist industry was established on Lanzarote, made possibly by the advent of large-scale air travel - Pan Am set up a waiting list for future flights to the Moon. Theiist, which gave the interested travellers a dedicated number that showed their place in line as well as a member card for the 'First Moon Flights Club', appeared to be a success: in the following decades it grew to a total of 93,000 people. Several decades later. the list has lost its initial appeal; whereas it has become more or less common to consider large-scale lunar tourism as an obvious part of our future, this is expected to happen in a less immediate future than when the list enjoyed its success. In his brief A Tourist's Guide to the Moon of 1982, renowned science-fiction author Isaac Asimov already situates the colonization and tourist appropriation of the Moon as far away as 2082. (His idea that the Moon's population doubles yearly when tourism is at its height, in fact, coincides with the yearly process that takes place on Lanzarote itself.)' As a tourist destination, the area around Timanfaya - in its role of moonscape - supplies the visitor with a provisional surrogate for a prospective experience that has until now failed to become possible, a final rehearsal for Moon tourism itself. To what exactly might the Moon owe the appeal as a tourist destination on which Lanzarote bases its peculiar self-description? For long, it might have been possible to describe the Moon's particular attraction in terms of a classical idea of exoticism as it is found in the images of the 1902 Voyage dans 10 fune , a silent film depicting a fanciful lunar landscape filled with bizarre forms of vegetation, remindful of romanticist painting and suffused with the promise of an encounter with the unknown . It is only in films of the 1960s, such 8s12 to the Moon, that the by-now accepted popular imagery of an arid, lifeless lunar landscape is introduced, marked by a sense of complete desolation rather than possible encounters and mysteries. This image of the lunar landscape testifies to an exoticism stripped from the sense of mystery that is classically attached to the concept; it merely owes its attractivity to its location outside of our encircled world, whose places have increasingly been discovered and subsequently brought within reach, published and made familiar by the most recent wave of globalization. This concept of the exotic, abstracted to its primary quality of a distance from everyday reality - a setting-outside, exos - is illustrated by an image that appears as a constant in all of the cinematic depictions of the moonscape: the view on planet Earth above the lunar horizon. It is this late, post-war image of a lifeless moonscape whose particular quality is its complete desolation that is matched by the landscape of inland Lanzarote, which is still almost entirely devoid of any flora and fauna. It is remarkable that the context in which the landscape of the Moon is documented and published globally in the 1950s and 1960s - that of the Cold War and its potentially catastrophic outcome - is mirrored in the fact that the 'volcanic moonscape' of Lanzarote is itself the result of an exceptionally violent disaster. During the obligatory bus tour through the 'volcanic moonscape,' a tape is played on which a Spanish priest's records

of the first years of the events are read aloud, evoking an apocalyptic scenery with showers of boiling rain, intoxicated cattle dropping dead, and huge numbers of dead fish floating around the sea and covering the shores, taking on 'shapes which islanders had never known before'. B When confronted with the view of the island, the main character of Michel Houellebecq's novel Lonzarote remarks: 'This, I thought, is what the world will look like when it dies' - might the desolate lunar landscape, of which Armstrong already said that it has a 'beauty of its own,' owe its appeal to the apocalyptic fantasy of a world wiped clean?

An audio-visual example of the bus tour can be found at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKpQ_hkkQ-O(August10. 2010). 2 The AA Spiral Guides to Lanzarote writes about Manrique's house: .... as you step into the first room of the house and look through the large picture window onto the lunar-like waste ground created by the lava field. you begin to appreciate the extraordinary vision of Manrique'. AA Spiral Guide Lonzorote. (london: Automobile Association 2006). p. 54.

Whereas the landscape of lanzarote never actually features as the Moon itself, the tourist guides claim that numerous feature films were shot on on the island is true; the landscape represents an Impressive variety of distant worlds and Imaginary places. among which planets such as 'Oraco,' 'Krull,' 'Nydenion,' or Werner Herzog's distant island inhabited exclusively by dwarfs. Respectivaly. these are found in: Enemy Mine (los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox 1985); Krull (Culver City: Columbia Pictures Corporation 1983): Nydenlon (Frankfurt am Main: Hessen-Invest Film 2010); and Even Dwarfs Started Small (Vienna: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion 1970).

James Egan. 'lanzarote: The Odd Island.' In The Atlantic (Boston: Antlantlc Monthly Co. 1962). Already in 1825, hydrographer John Hurdy s describes his first Image of the island as a juxtaposition with the moon: '... the land appeared, like a small cloud. at the edge of the horizon. [ ... ] Antares threw out Its resplendent rays near the lunar disk. which was but a few degrees above the horizon.' In John Hurdy. Memoir, descriptive
and explanatory, to accompany the new chort of Atlantic

Ocean: ond comprising Instruction, general and particular, for

the navigation
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Father Andres Lorenzo Curbelo's written record of the events is translated In: Michel Houellebecq. Lanzarote (London: Vintage 2004), pp. 83-7.

0' that sea. 1825.

See, for instance, the travel guide on http://cheaperholidays. com (August 9. 2010). Most guides are more modest in claiming that astronauts in training were shown detailed images of the landscape in order to prepare them for their lunar landing. See AA Spirol Guide Lanzorote {note 2J.

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See Isaac Asimov, A Tourist's Guide to the Moon'. In The New York Times. January 10, 1982. See the description of the bus tour by Lanzorote Tour Accommodations and Services. http://www.lanzarote-tour.com/lugares_ interes/timanfaya/timanfaya.php (August 10, 2010). English translation taken from the appendix to Michel Houellabecq [note 5].

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