Ele Carpenter: 'The Nuclear Anthropocene'
Saturday 28 February
16:00 - 17:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
Meuse/Haute Marne Underground Research Laboratory for Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste, Bure, northern France, 2014.
Ele Carpenter introduces her curatorial research into nuclear culture, drawing on artistic practices in Europe and Japan, and field trips to underground research laboratories for high-level radioactive waste storage at Horonobe, Japan, and Bure in northern France. While the slow violence of radiation may render it imperceptible, the foregrounding of radiation through accidents and public consultation programmes reflects the evolution of this ‘hyperobject’ from state (weapons), to private (energy), to the public sphere through ‘public consultation’. We witness the disaster unfold in slow motion; as we adapt to living in a radioactive environment, we consider what the nuclear archive should contain for future generations. nuclear.artscatalyst.org
ConferencePart of
Session 9: The Nuclear Dimension
Saturday 28 February
16:00 - 17:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
Ele Carpenter & Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse
In this panel we look at artistic approaches and responses to the ‘nuclear dimension’, and the imaginings of a future on a geological scale. We have to imagine that the impact of our activities stretches far into a nonhuman future, and, if we take an ethical position, it implies potentially communicating with a future species that lives on Earth… The mounds that store nuclear waste are uncanny monuments to humanity that will outlast the human species as we know it.