Curated darkness: Cold War bunkers and affective geographies of nuclear tourism

The article explores emerging forms of nuclear tourism through a geographical lens, moving beyond the dark tourism paradigm to introduce curated darkness as a framework for understanding how affect, multisensoriality, and performativity shape visitors’ spatial and embodied experiences. Focusing on decommissioned Cold War bunkers in Central and Eastern Europe as layered geopolitical landscapes, the study examines curatorial, spatial, and narrative strategies that construct affective atmospheres of fear – merging memory, spectacle, and territorial imaginaries. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography across four bunker sites located in diverse geopolitical contexts, the paper highlights how multisensory design (darkness, soundscapes, spatial confinement, and tactile cues) mediates visitors’ embodied engagement with catastrophe, survival, and the uncanny. Conceptually, the paper advances curated darkness to capture the performative, affective, and sensory dynamics of heritage landscapes. Analytically, it integrates multisensoriality into geographical approaches to tourism and heritage; methodologically, it demonstrates how collaborative autoethnography can bring important insights into studies of affective tourism environments. By situating post-conflict and post-industrial sites within broader spatial economies of remembrance and spectacle, the study expands dark tourism scholarship and calls for a re-theorization of visitor experience through the geography of affect and curation. Ultimately, it argues that nuclear heritage landscapes are geopolitically charged, multisensory terrains where curatorship, storytelling and affect converge, rendering the experience of history both spatially impressive and politically resonant.