Juno Calypso

From 'What To Do With A Million Years', 2019

From 'What To Do With A Million Years', 2019

Juno Calypso stands in a kitchen 26 feet underground in Las Vegas, wearing a dressing gown. The kitchen is all pink and white, white appliances, retro fixtures, preserved exactly as it was built in 1964. It looks like a television set from that era, which is precisely what it is: a stage for performing domesticity. Gerry Henderson, CEO of Avon Cosmetics, and his wife built this 16,000 square foot bunker during Cold War paranoia and lived there full-time. The house now belongs to a collective of scientists who study the preservation of human life, interested in cryonics and immortality.

Calypso performs housewife in a dressing gown, enacting morning domestic ritual in a kitchen designed for a 1960s fantasy of feminine labour. She's alone, posing in this preserved set, playing the role the space demands. The kitchen is a time capsule of gendered expectation: woman in domestic space, woman in the kitchen, woman maintaining home even 26 feet underground in a bunker built to survive nuclear war.

The kitchen domesticates catastrophe. Henderson didn't just build a survival shelter, he built a suburban home underground, complete with the aesthetics and gender roles of 1960s America. You don't need pink countertops and white appliances to survive. You need water, food, air. But survival for the wealthy isn't about mere existence, it's about maintaining class distinction and domestic order underground. The kitchen reveals the ideology: even in apocalypse, the performance continues. Someone still cooks. Someone still wears a dressing gown in the morning kitchen.

Calypso's performance is deadpan, ironic, British. She photographs herself playing housewife in this retro stage set, lampooning the values frozen in the bunker's pink and white surfaces. The dressing gown, the kitchen, the morning ritual, all of it performs 1960s feminine domesticity as farce. The photograph asks: what survives the end of the world? Not just bodies but the structures that organize them, the roles that persist, the performances that continue even when the world above has ended and no one remains to watch.

Juno Calypso (b. 1989) is a British photographer known for constructed self-portraits that critique femininity, beauty culture, and gendered expectations.

More on Calypso: junocalypso.com