Session 9: The Nuclear Dimension
Saturday 28 February
16:00 - 17:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
In this panel we look at artistic approaches and responses to the ‘nuclear dimension’, and the imaginings of a future on a geological scale. The dimension of nuclear waste is truly mind-boggling. Human-created nuclear waste is incredibly harmful for hundreds of thousands of years. 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.
Ele Carpenter: 'The Nuclear Anthropocene'
Saturday 28 February
16:00 - 17:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
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.
Smudge Studio: 'Practices for Turning into the Anthropocene: Look Only at the Movement'
Saturday 28 February
16:00 - 17:30
Paradiso, Main Hall
In the fall of 2012, two artists set out with a car-mounted video camera to seek out a particularly abject material-event. For twelve days, they travelled the routes used by the trucks transporting transuranic nuclear waste through Utah, New Mexico and Colorado.