Panel 1: Agencies of Land

Nic Pehkonen, Sizewell Trees (2023). MOV file [duration 2m 37s].

Some of the earliest infrastructural elements of the Sizewell C nuclear new-build project are the nature reserves and habitats situated both within and just outside the site boundary, which are being created as a form of ecological mitigation. In this strictly human endeavour, nature is literally engineered into the site development as a precursive offset to further interventions that will inevitably impact on the existing natural environment during the later site construction phase and subsequent operation.

Sizewell Trees was created in collaboration with local woodlands and the wind to consider a fictional conversation taking place between groups of existing trees adjoining the proposed Sizewell C site. Not understanding this intriguing exchange, we can only draw on our own imaginations as to what might be being said. The audio is overlayed with an aerial view of the existing Sizewell site and immediate surroundings which slowly dissolves into a closeup view of a currently fenced-off zone where a sign informs us as to the location of some of the initial environmental changes.

There is an intentional ambiguity to this piece as it blurs both real and imaginary boundaries between human and non-human worlds within a suitably grey nuclear context.

Andy Weir, Earth/Unearth I (2021), video, 3 mins 30 secs

Andy Weir’s ongoing research project Pazugoo has involved burying 3d-printed demons as underground ‘markers’ of nuclear waste at specific locations. Perhaps unearthed at a later date by someone or something, or perhaps not, they call to an unknown future addressee.

The video shown here is from research in Belgium, around the Mol-Dessel area, site of the HADES underground laboratory for testing long-term storage of radioactive materials. Originally shown as part of an installation including buried objects and research into local myths of ground and flight, it is reconfigured here as two ‘stacked’ screens. Drawing on discussions with a local cultural heritage expert and nuclear engineer, the narration combines myths and material science of the earth, drawn upon in the creation of new demon objects.

Biography

Andy Weir is an artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, UAL. His work builds ‘geo-fictions’ to explore poetics and politics of deep time futures. This has focused on nuclear waste and planetary toxicity, although new work explores underground waste more generally through a cartography of fatberg flow. The work includes video, writing, sound, sculpture, installation, collaborations, workshops and actions. Recent exhibitions include Splitting the Atom, Vilnius Art Centre (2020); The Work of Time, Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Hasselt, Belgium (2020), and Neuhaus, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (2019). Recent publications include an article on legacies of UK nuclear colonialism in Journal of Visual Culture (2023), on nuclear waste site ‘marking’ in a special edition of Centre for Social Studies e-cadernos (2023), and a chapter on Pazugoo in Politics of Design Re-framed (Public Space, 2022). He holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Colin Perry, Karrabing Film Collective and the Crowded Soils (presentation 20 mins)

This talk explores the work of the Karrabing Film Collective, which Elizabeth Povinelli asserts are documents of ‘improvisational realization’ (2016, 86), and which may also be considered ethnofiction in the tradition of Jean Rouch (Lea and Povinelli, 2018, 41). In films such as Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016), the indigenous members of the Collective negotiate with a landscape that is crowded with spirits, ancestors, totems. A crowded landscape of affective relations is far from that of the legal designation of Australia as terra nullius as it was from 1835 to the late twentieth century; however, as Povinelli also points out, the members of the Collective hardly are ‘rooted’ to an ancestral soil, since they were forcibly ejected from their homelands (2016, 24). Instead, indigenous ontology enables a negotiation with the environment that treats that world as vibrantly populated. Through such works, narratives of land can be shifted from settler colonial ontologies of ownership to a being-with the terrestrial (Latour, 2018). Chandler and Reid (2019), however, assert that theoretical engagement with indigeneity as narration, the ‘stories that tell stories’ (Haraway, 2016, 35), themselves often repeat colonial forms of knowledge-power. This talk considers how Karrabing Film Collective negotiates these conditions through powerfully experimental moving image works

Biography

Colin Perry is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art contextual studies and theory at Arts University Bournemouth. His main research areas are artists’ moving image, ruralities, and notions of radical publics. He is editor of Art and the Rural Imagination (MTP, 2022), on notions of ‘the rural’ in contemporary art. His first monograph is Radical Mainstream: Independent Film, Video and Television in Britain, 1974-1990 (Intellect, 2020), exploring counterpublics in video art, radical cinema and television. His research has been published in journals including the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ), Critical Studies in Television and a chapter in Laura Mulvey and Sue Clayton’s volume Other Cinemas (I.B. Tauris, 2017). His journalism and criticism is featured in a range of arts magazines such as Art Monthly, including the recent feature ‘Earth Matters’ (2023) on contemporary art and the soil.

Michelle Atherton, Errant Vibrations with the underground (presentation 20 mins)

A presentation of art-based research on how undertaking a natural burial for a close relative led to a realisation about the difficulty secular societies have in dealing with death and dead bodies. Leading to speculations on our affective relationships with transience, through time spent listening to sounds from the soil. There are, of course, different types of deaths and the experience of someone dying is not monolithic. This presentation will argue, with Akomolafe, that we need different approaches to death and thinking about life that do not distance demise, dying, compost, grief and loss 1 .

I speculate on how a different set of affective relationships might be triggered through listening to the ground. For centuries cultures have interred their dead in the ground. Creating an audible connection with frequencies from the soil might open different material relations with the ground and its processes - with the living, the dead and the inert.

Part of this conjecture concerns the effective dynamics involved in listening to sounds not automatically recognisable as everyday noises and how an ecological imaginary comes into play. There are questions about how we perceive sound itself and the processes of transduction, where one form of energy is transformed into another through devices using rare earth minerals. Advocating for listening practices based on methods of intimacy and intermittent attention spans. Overall, the aim is to consider how vibrations from the underground might initiate more errant ways of engaging with transience.

Biography

Michelle Atherton’s work holds a fascination with the complex relations, dynamics and contradictions at play in day-to-day experiences and phenomena. Recent artworks have involved celebratory gatherings paying tribute to the dead across species; alternative imaginaries from the ocean’s depth’s; an examination of On Demand cultures, rural effigies, and everyday irrational gestures. Her work often uses a remix aesthetic incorporating sound, image, text and installation to create fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world. The aim is to look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics and new imaginaries. Her artwork has been supported by the Arts Council England and the Arts & Humanities Research Council and shown throughout Europe in galleries, museums, festivals, conferences and publications. She teaches fine art to postgraduates and has recently been awarded an ECRI Fellowship 2022-23 from Sheffield Hallam University.

Eleanor Duffin / Owen Lloyd, A Grounding (audio, 20 mins)

We would like to invite you into a new position. For this performative reading we ask you to lay down with us and to think slowly, at a geological pace. Originally written as an imagining of the substrata in St Ives & Carbis Bay, Cornwall, A Grounding aims to evoke a dreamlike state and provoke your own journey to those locations or a place familiar which can be grafted onto our words. Props will be provided to make your experience more comfortable and enable you to let go.

The intention of this work is to create a moment for collective physical rest whilst thinking of the body and it’s shared properties with geology. Sound for this work has been recorded on site in St Ives and adapted to allow for a deeper tangible material experience.

Biography

Eleanor Duffin is a visual artist, whose practice explores the role of verbal and text-based language in the process of making, the relationship between the female body and traditional sculptural materials and the nature of co-working with both human and non-human entities.

Owen Lloyd is a composer, sound artist, designer and researcher with a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration that integrates art, science and technology.

Video on the monitor

Laura Cooper, The Sun's Tongue (2023) (video on monitor, 9mins)

The Sun’s Tongue documents the relationship between beekeeper, bees and the plant life of Birmingham city centre over the beekeeping season of 2022. It aims to map the plants that the bees forage on and the biodiversity of plant life in the city using 16mm film and experimental plant-based processes. The bee’s live on rooftops cross the city centre, the Custard factory, the Bullring and Millennium Point, buildings which triangulate the area of Digbeth. The project also tracked the bees diet, collecting and sampling pollen they bring back to the hive on their legs. The pollen has been scanned using electron microscopy to create digital images that are also incorporated in the film.

Each plants pollen grains are unique and they come in a variety of colours and unique forms. The bees diet is made up of a variety of these plants, which changes over the flowering season. The film becomes in itself quite bee-like, taking single frame animations with a 16mm Bolex camera mapping the plant life of the streets, canals and carparks. It attempts to create a pollen colour chart unique to this locality and these particular hives of bees.

Biography

Laura Cooper is a British artist and filmmaker. She has exhibited and participated in residencies internationally. Solo exhibitions include Softening the Grid, Milton Keynes Arts Centre 2018, Nomadic Glow, Centro ADM Mexico City 2015, Soft Revolutions, Space In Between Gallery, London 2013. Selected group presentations include Showroom gallery, Rich Mix Cinema, The Tate Britain and Ikon Gallery. Selected artists residencies include Land Art Mongolia 360°Biennale, where she worked with a nomadic Herdsman to create the video installation Colour Poem for Hyesous’ Herd 2015, PRAKSIS Olso Residency, Norway and Residency 108. NY, USA, where she made the film Lure 2017. She was awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund 2013, International Artist Development Funding 2014 and Arts Council England Grant 2018. Laura was commissioned by Groundworks to make the film Eating Up the Sky 2018, working with falconers and scientists at Oxford University. She was artist in residence with Grand Union at Bruntwood Works 2020-22, creating the project The Future is Soft.