Nuclear Culture and Decoloniality
This research project aims to decolonize the European nuclear waste site marker project focused on ‘Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M). Following the path of uranium from Europe back to mines in Australia enables new conversations with aboriginal artists whose 60,000 year knowledge of radioactivity in the landscape could offer new insights to the European working groups on how to embed records, knowledge and memory of radioactive waste within culture for future generations. New aesthetic theories of nuclear decoloniality will be investigated in relation to nuclear sites and communities in Europe and Australia; leading to a new publication and research events.
The research will investigate how deep time intergenerational story telling from Sickness Country in the Norther Territories of Australia can inform and develop more complex and nuanced understanding of deep time memory work required for high level radioactive waste storage sites in Europe and beyond. Research questions include: How can theoretical work on nuclear aesthetics create a new decolonial geo-politics or planetarity of nuclear traces over time and space? What are the aesthetic relationships between decontamination and decolonization? How can Europe (and the EU as represented by Euratom, NEA and OECD) acknowledge its nuclear colonialism by respecting and integrating indigenous knowledge and in-person representation into twenty-first century working groups on radioactive waste management and site marking?
The research will investigate how deep time intergenerational story telling from Sickness Country in the Norther Territories of Australia can inform and develop more complex and nuanced understanding of deep time memory work required for high level radioactive waste storage sites in Europe and beyond. Research questions include: How can theoretical work on nuclear aesthetics create a new decolonial geo-politics or planetarity of nuclear traces over time and space? What are the aesthetic relationships between decontamination and decolonization? How can Europe (and the EU as represented by Euratom, NEA and OECD) acknowledge its nuclear colonialism by respecting and integrating indigenous knowledge and in-person representation into twenty-first century working groups on radioactive waste management and site marking?
Final report
The Nuclear Culture and Decoloniality six month RJ Sabbatical enabled Professor Ele Carpenter to undertake new field work and research at the two extremes of nuclear colonization: from Euratom’s origins at the Joint Research Centre of the European Union in Ispra, Italy; to uranium mining on indigenous lands in the Northern Territory of Australia.
New research partnerships were established with artists and communities in the Northern Territory, the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University, the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and the JRC in Ispra, Italy. The sabbatical has also enabled Ele Carpenter to re-establish her curatorial practice in Sweden, working with the Uppsala Konstmuseum and Östhammar Kommun to plan new exhibitions for 2028-2029 in the context of Sweden’s repository for the geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel at Forsmark. The exhibition proposals were included in the Uppsala European City of Culture application for 2029.
Working with indigenous communities requires a long-term commitment, and the development of clear consensual agreements that need to be negotiated in person. In Arnhem land, Ele Carpenter met with Jawoyn artist Jeremiah Garlangrr and his family to hear the story of their Coronation Hill/ Guratba Earthquake Dreaming paintings, and clarify the details and meaning in relation to the landscape and the community. The encoding of behavioral safety and consequences of disturbing the ground illustrated in the images and story correlates with many of the Sickness stories and uranium mining sites in the region. In the Kakadu National Park, Carpenter met with Traditional Owner Jeffery Lee to visit his Koongara country, a former mining lease, which has recently been integrated into the national park and the UNESCO World heritage site. Whilst visiting the lease Ele undertook a radiation protection survey of uranium cores in dilapidated buildings left behind by mining prospectors, which she has submitted to the Office of the Supervising Scientist and the NT Environment Centre. This radiation protection survey will form a case study in the book, but needs a return visit to review the report and analysis with the Traditional owner so that the relationship between the Lightening Dreaming and the Koongara lease is respectfully and accurately described before it can be published. Whilst in Australia, Ele was able to see an exhibition of the Spinifex artists, whose paintings were essential in their land claims from nuclear testing sites in Maralinga. This has opened up a new area of research into the way in which paintings have social and legal agency in the courts, reclaiming lands that were taken as part of nuclear colonization.
The findings have huge significance for understanding intergenerational knowledge transfer about nuclear sites over 60,000 years, and the role of socially engaged painting within community and culture. Indigenous methodologies destabilise European theoretical perspectives on nuclear landscapes, nuclear decoloniality, cold war legacies, nuclear heritage and nuclear semiotics and have hugely impacted on the focus and structure of Carpenter’s writing and book proposal. The intense period of learning about the of role of art as integral to Aboriginal living culture, which includes warnings for future generations, is currently reconfiguring language, concepts and the very act of writing in relation to an oral and visual tradition.
Carpenter continues to work on a series of new chapters for her open access monograph manuscript, which has been restructured in response to working with indigenous communities in Australia, and guided by the Nuclear Truth Project protocols seeking Nuclear Truth with Integrity. https://nucleartruthproject.org/protocols/ The protocols focus on the rights, respect and reciprocity with those impacted by nuclear harms, and helps to slow down research processes to put decolonial methodologies into practice in a nuclear context.
The monograph will now include a mix of field notes, case studies and theoretical chapters for rethinking the culture of radiation from the radioactive landscape, nuclear decoloniality and the role of distributed and networked contemporary art providing links between communities, museums and nuclear sites. The working title ’Planetary Nuclear Aesthetics’, is inspired by Spivak’s concept of planetarity (Spivak, 2005) where the language of the planet is used to overwrite the designation of global industry, or the nation state ownership of internationalism. Further conceptual work on the Anthropocene by Yusoff (2018), ancestral violence by Povinelli, and the myth of isolates Deloughrey (2019a/b), provides a useful analysis for decolonizing the concept of the Nuclear Anthropocene (Wyck, 2016). In addition, new writing by Aboriginal scholars such as Professor Anne Polina and Associate Professor Mary Graham are helping to reposition nuclearity in relation to culture, community and country in Australia. New research into Anthropological studies on Sickness country from the 1980s is opening up some of the historical complexity of working with men’s business, traditional sites and rock art that should only be seen by men; and the need to respect sacred sites and traditions whilst telling the first level of a story that has many complex layers that are only revealed to the initiated when they are ready. This presents many challenges in decolonizing research methodologies, where from a European perspective the concept of the public interest and reproduction rights are the standard legal frameworks. In Australia cultural rights are much more complex, and restrict the reproduction of an image and the story that goes with it. This can inhibit critical analysis and comparative study, and creates new ethical challenges for researchers and publishers. For this reason, the book will have separate chapters for storytelling and analysis, and requires a new approach to curatorial writing where the artwork has to stand alone, and theory happens elsewhere.
The research questions helped to clarify how deep time intergenerational story telling from Sickness Country can inform and develop more complex and nuanced understanding of deep time memory work required for high level radioactive waste storage sites in Europe. This is not a simple answer, but a highly sophisticated culture of networked social relations embedded in the landscape, storytelling, dreaming, ceremonies, paintings and rock art. Meaning and knowledge is continually reproduced with respect to the ancestors, helping young people to learn their culture, and caring for country for future generations.
To understand how theoretical work on nuclear aesthetics could create a new decolonial geo-politics or planetarity of nuclear traces over time and space, the question needs to be inverted. Instead we should ask how can decolonial planetary nuclear traces create a new nuclear aesthetics? For example, Yvonne Margarula’s letter to the UN expressing solidarity with the people of Fukushima traces the uranium forcibly extracted from Mirrar lands to its use in nuclear power plants in Japan. The correlation between uranium mining in the Kakadu park and the Fukushima Daiichi NPP disaster is part of the Sickness Country stories at the centre of this research project. As we can see in Jeremiah Garlngarr’s painting of the Bula Djang Coronation Hill earthquake story, the disturbance of the creation ancestors in Australia can cause earth tremors and earthquakes in other countries. Here theoretical frameworks are only useful if put into practice, and this is the value and potential impact of curatorial research which has the potential to create cultural exchanges between communities in different nuclear sites around the world.
The sabbatical research has opened up new research questions on how to decolonize radioactive waste management, inspired by Samia Henni’s work around Colonial Toxicity as the result of French nuclear testing in Algeria in the 1960s, and the current protest against radioactive waste from the Aukus nuclear submarines in Australia. New questions include: What are the principles of Aboriginal law and culture in relation to radioactive waste management? How can contemporary curating decolonise the discourse of RWM? Can there be an “acknowledgement” to nuclear colonization? And could this acknowledgement address legacy waste and nuclear harms to enable new dangers to be addressed?
A decolonial close reading of the European Directive on Radioactive waste reveals the attempt to separate military and extraction wastes from civilian radioactive waste designated for what we might call domestic GDF’s – geologic disposal facilities. However in countries with nuclear weapons programmes, it is inevitable that their high level waste will also be designated for the GDF.
Further funding will be sought to return to Australia to research the relationship between art and land claims within nuclear weapons testing areas, and to greater understand the postcolonial nuclear conditions of Australia in relation to radioactive waste management and the new Aukus agreement on nuclear submarines.
Whilst in Australia Ele Carpenter gave a public talk at the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University. On return to Sweden Ele was invited to present her research at the NEA/OECD Forum for Stakeholder Confidence meeting, SSM, Stockholm; the Nuclear Natures PhD Autumn School and Conference organized by Anna Storm at the University of Linköping. She will also present at the UmArts Hurricanes and Scaffolding Vetenskapsrådet Artistic Research Symposium, and in 2025 she will hold a research seminar on her field work in Australia at Umeå School of Architecture, both at Umeå University, Sweden.
New research partnerships were established with artists and communities in the Northern Territory, the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University, the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and the JRC in Ispra, Italy. The sabbatical has also enabled Ele Carpenter to re-establish her curatorial practice in Sweden, working with the Uppsala Konstmuseum and Östhammar Kommun to plan new exhibitions for 2028-2029 in the context of Sweden’s repository for the geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel at Forsmark. The exhibition proposals were included in the Uppsala European City of Culture application for 2029.
Working with indigenous communities requires a long-term commitment, and the development of clear consensual agreements that need to be negotiated in person. In Arnhem land, Ele Carpenter met with Jawoyn artist Jeremiah Garlangrr and his family to hear the story of their Coronation Hill/ Guratba Earthquake Dreaming paintings, and clarify the details and meaning in relation to the landscape and the community. The encoding of behavioral safety and consequences of disturbing the ground illustrated in the images and story correlates with many of the Sickness stories and uranium mining sites in the region. In the Kakadu National Park, Carpenter met with Traditional Owner Jeffery Lee to visit his Koongara country, a former mining lease, which has recently been integrated into the national park and the UNESCO World heritage site. Whilst visiting the lease Ele undertook a radiation protection survey of uranium cores in dilapidated buildings left behind by mining prospectors, which she has submitted to the Office of the Supervising Scientist and the NT Environment Centre. This radiation protection survey will form a case study in the book, but needs a return visit to review the report and analysis with the Traditional owner so that the relationship between the Lightening Dreaming and the Koongara lease is respectfully and accurately described before it can be published. Whilst in Australia, Ele was able to see an exhibition of the Spinifex artists, whose paintings were essential in their land claims from nuclear testing sites in Maralinga. This has opened up a new area of research into the way in which paintings have social and legal agency in the courts, reclaiming lands that were taken as part of nuclear colonization.
The findings have huge significance for understanding intergenerational knowledge transfer about nuclear sites over 60,000 years, and the role of socially engaged painting within community and culture. Indigenous methodologies destabilise European theoretical perspectives on nuclear landscapes, nuclear decoloniality, cold war legacies, nuclear heritage and nuclear semiotics and have hugely impacted on the focus and structure of Carpenter’s writing and book proposal. The intense period of learning about the of role of art as integral to Aboriginal living culture, which includes warnings for future generations, is currently reconfiguring language, concepts and the very act of writing in relation to an oral and visual tradition.
Carpenter continues to work on a series of new chapters for her open access monograph manuscript, which has been restructured in response to working with indigenous communities in Australia, and guided by the Nuclear Truth Project protocols seeking Nuclear Truth with Integrity. https://nucleartruthproject.org/protocols/ The protocols focus on the rights, respect and reciprocity with those impacted by nuclear harms, and helps to slow down research processes to put decolonial methodologies into practice in a nuclear context.
The monograph will now include a mix of field notes, case studies and theoretical chapters for rethinking the culture of radiation from the radioactive landscape, nuclear decoloniality and the role of distributed and networked contemporary art providing links between communities, museums and nuclear sites. The working title ’Planetary Nuclear Aesthetics’, is inspired by Spivak’s concept of planetarity (Spivak, 2005) where the language of the planet is used to overwrite the designation of global industry, or the nation state ownership of internationalism. Further conceptual work on the Anthropocene by Yusoff (2018), ancestral violence by Povinelli, and the myth of isolates Deloughrey (2019a/b), provides a useful analysis for decolonizing the concept of the Nuclear Anthropocene (Wyck, 2016). In addition, new writing by Aboriginal scholars such as Professor Anne Polina and Associate Professor Mary Graham are helping to reposition nuclearity in relation to culture, community and country in Australia. New research into Anthropological studies on Sickness country from the 1980s is opening up some of the historical complexity of working with men’s business, traditional sites and rock art that should only be seen by men; and the need to respect sacred sites and traditions whilst telling the first level of a story that has many complex layers that are only revealed to the initiated when they are ready. This presents many challenges in decolonizing research methodologies, where from a European perspective the concept of the public interest and reproduction rights are the standard legal frameworks. In Australia cultural rights are much more complex, and restrict the reproduction of an image and the story that goes with it. This can inhibit critical analysis and comparative study, and creates new ethical challenges for researchers and publishers. For this reason, the book will have separate chapters for storytelling and analysis, and requires a new approach to curatorial writing where the artwork has to stand alone, and theory happens elsewhere.
The research questions helped to clarify how deep time intergenerational story telling from Sickness Country can inform and develop more complex and nuanced understanding of deep time memory work required for high level radioactive waste storage sites in Europe. This is not a simple answer, but a highly sophisticated culture of networked social relations embedded in the landscape, storytelling, dreaming, ceremonies, paintings and rock art. Meaning and knowledge is continually reproduced with respect to the ancestors, helping young people to learn their culture, and caring for country for future generations.
To understand how theoretical work on nuclear aesthetics could create a new decolonial geo-politics or planetarity of nuclear traces over time and space, the question needs to be inverted. Instead we should ask how can decolonial planetary nuclear traces create a new nuclear aesthetics? For example, Yvonne Margarula’s letter to the UN expressing solidarity with the people of Fukushima traces the uranium forcibly extracted from Mirrar lands to its use in nuclear power plants in Japan. The correlation between uranium mining in the Kakadu park and the Fukushima Daiichi NPP disaster is part of the Sickness Country stories at the centre of this research project. As we can see in Jeremiah Garlngarr’s painting of the Bula Djang Coronation Hill earthquake story, the disturbance of the creation ancestors in Australia can cause earth tremors and earthquakes in other countries. Here theoretical frameworks are only useful if put into practice, and this is the value and potential impact of curatorial research which has the potential to create cultural exchanges between communities in different nuclear sites around the world.
The sabbatical research has opened up new research questions on how to decolonize radioactive waste management, inspired by Samia Henni’s work around Colonial Toxicity as the result of French nuclear testing in Algeria in the 1960s, and the current protest against radioactive waste from the Aukus nuclear submarines in Australia. New questions include: What are the principles of Aboriginal law and culture in relation to radioactive waste management? How can contemporary curating decolonise the discourse of RWM? Can there be an “acknowledgement” to nuclear colonization? And could this acknowledgement address legacy waste and nuclear harms to enable new dangers to be addressed?
A decolonial close reading of the European Directive on Radioactive waste reveals the attempt to separate military and extraction wastes from civilian radioactive waste designated for what we might call domestic GDF’s – geologic disposal facilities. However in countries with nuclear weapons programmes, it is inevitable that their high level waste will also be designated for the GDF.
Further funding will be sought to return to Australia to research the relationship between art and land claims within nuclear weapons testing areas, and to greater understand the postcolonial nuclear conditions of Australia in relation to radioactive waste management and the new Aukus agreement on nuclear submarines.
Whilst in Australia Ele Carpenter gave a public talk at the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University. On return to Sweden Ele was invited to present her research at the NEA/OECD Forum for Stakeholder Confidence meeting, SSM, Stockholm; the Nuclear Natures PhD Autumn School and Conference organized by Anna Storm at the University of Linköping. She will also present at the UmArts Hurricanes and Scaffolding Vetenskapsrådet Artistic Research Symposium, and in 2025 she will hold a research seminar on her field work in Australia at Umeå School of Architecture, both at Umeå University, Sweden.