The Nuclear Culture Research Group will participate in the second Umeå Transformation Research Initiative (UTRI) annual conference Dealing with the polycrisis. The Nuclear Polycrisis panel will be chaired by Ele Carpenter, Professor of Interdisciplinary Art and Culture, with presentations by artist researchers Christian Danielewitz (Denmark/Oslo) and Agnes Villette (France/Belgium). The session takes place during Block 1: 13.00-14.30.
The nuclear polycrisis raised the question of how to decolonising intersectional nuclearity. How can artistic and curatorial research help to unpack the complexity of the nuclear polycrisis and create new forms of resilience? The world has entered a new era of geopolitical and environmental instability which presents specific nuclear challenges. Today the weaponization of radioactive waste sites and nuclear power plants, the rebranding of nuclear energy as “green”, renewed Uranium prospecting, and the impact of rising sealevels on coastal nuclear power plants, all subvert traditional nuclear narratives.
Christian Danielewitz (Denmark, living in Oslo) will explore how artistic practice can generate new ways of sensing, knowing, and resisting within unjust systems of colonial legacies and the inequal global distibution of toxic waste and pollution. The paper draws on my field work on frontlines of resource extraction, such as rural villages in Senegal’s phosphate mining districts, and townships in the Zambian Copperbelt, where my work engages with concepts of slow violence, material witness, and investigative aesthetics to make visible the long-term impacts of environmental degradation and toxic residues. The paper situates these methods within a broader framework for socio-environmental justice and extractivism, proposing models for how artistic research can make space for voices that are excluded from conventional political arenas.
Agnes Villiette (France/Belgium) will examine the formation of an eclectic nuclear geography on the shores of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands where three nuclear installations, all built on polders: Gravelines, Doel and Borssele nuclear power stations started operating in the same decade, in the 1970s, on the unstable marsh soils of reclaimed land. Today, rising sea levels due to global warming threaten the three nuclear plants imminently, requiring the construction of dykes and elevated buffers, which are currently being implemented. In the paper, I will consider the Gravelines swampy geography as a place where the future-oriented temporality of the nuclear sector crumbles. Threaten by the encroaching sea and surrounded by heavy petrochemical industries, Gravelines’ six reactors nuclear plant epitomises the unravelling environmental polycrisis.
