Venue
KARST
Date
Saturday, October 11, 2014
05:15 PM
Address
22 George Place Plymouth, PL13NY UK
Location
South West England
Organiser
KARST

As nuclear materials shift from the state, to private sector, to public realm, the industry is seeking a broader set of conceptual frameworks for understanding the complexity of long term siting, storage and monitoring of radioactive waste. This high level waste will decay over the next 100,000 years.

 

In Europe there is now a consensus that high level radioactive waste should be stored in Geological Repositories deep underground, accompanied by the task of preserving their ‘Records, Knowledge & Memory’ for the future. The project exceeds human perceptions of time and responsibility beyond short-term aims of building nuclear reactors, and the short-term cycle of politics. So the nuclear industry is engaging a wider range of humanities scholars and stakeholders to deal with the longer-term problems of understanding deep time, nuclear semiotics, site markers, archives and nuclear cultural heritage.

 

Ele Carpenter will discuss some of the ways in which artists are dealing with the aesthetic, cultural and socio-political challenges of the nuclear, from the formation of the earth to the nuclear anthropocene.

Ele Carpenter is a curator, writer and artist in politicised art and interdisciplinary social networks of making. Her curatorial research into Nuclear Culture is a partnership between The Arts Catalyst and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she is a Lecturer in MFA Curating. Ele’s research into Nuclear Culture in partnership with the Submarine Dismantling Advisory Group was awarded an AHRC Early Career Research Fellowship (2012-13). Projects include: Nuclear Culture Symposium (2013), Panning for Atomic Gold Symposium (2014) London; Actinium exhibition & forum, Sapporo, Japan (2014); Artists field trips to nuclear sites in the UK and Japan. She is currently researching a major exhibition for the BildMuseet in 2016. See: http://nuclear.artscatalyst.org/