BADAGLIACCA, Vanessa — Text for the handout of the exhibition Museu Mineiro

Portuguese
other texts

The current climate crisis and consequent urgent necessity to find alternative ways to produce energy, the war in Ukraine started in February this year and bringing to the fore the energetic dependency of some European and Mediterranean countries on fossil fuels imported from Russia, reawakened a concern on nuclear power and nuclear energy. Those are connected with fears evocative of some of the most terrible disasters from the twentieth and twenty-first century, such as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear experiments in North Korea, to arrive to the current nuclear threat caused by the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The nuclear imagination, addressed by poet Drew Milne in his “Poetry After Hiroshima? Notes on Nuclear Implicature” (2017), is presently reemerging with its double face for the power and danger it conveys. Just what is it that makes today’s nuclear so easy, so appealing? Borrowing the question from the title of a collage that Richard Hamilton released in 1956 and replacing the original word Home with Nuclear, we may find some prompts for reflection. Through that piece the British artist recognized the domestic space as the main arena to which channel advertising for a new set of commodities, including male and female body as a result of a consumerist society. Both an image of progress and a promise of modernity that goes hand in hand with a possibility of emancipation by external suppliers.

In the path toward improvement of solar and wind energy, nuclear power is seen as an answer to maintain a stable production of these kinds of renewable energy, therefore a useful tool for obtaining a stable value of the so-called clean energies and a contributor to achieving zero emission. The promise of advanced technology to implement it makes it even more appealing, offering an image of up-to-date production of energy compatible with the necessity of individual and industrial needs. However, these kinds of evaluations seem to completely dismiss or conceal the other side of the supposed image of purity and cleanliness that the nuclear energy produced with the most sophisticated technology wish to sell. Clean and pure do not and cannot get rid of the waste coming from uranium. At a time when the benefit of supposed clean energy is promoted as a promise to employ energy that excuses the exploitation of soils and resources that impoverish the Earth, the danger of nuclear waste goes silenced. Nuclear is appealing, clean, modern, and advanced. In a word, it is evolution.

The arts have responded with interest and posing complex questions about nuclear, whether in favour or against it. For instance, in the context of post-war Italy, nuclear power plants installed in the south of Italy at the beginning of the 1950s were considered a way towards industrial development – although without any public political consensus through a vote that would legitimate their installation in the country – and closed immediately after the Chernobyl disaster. That was the social and political environment that gave rise in 1951 to the “Manifesto Della Pittura Nucleare” (“Manifesto of Nuclear Painting”), whose main spokepersons Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo at first considered with excitement the possible new horizons offered by nuclear energy. The latter was associated with disrupting academicism in the art field and broadening the borders of the discipline as Futurism or Spatialism aimed to do earlier.

Nevertheless, as art historian Gabrielle Decamous (2011) poignantly pointed out – the interest in the atom within the arts did not appear after the bombing but rather dates from long ago, for instance in Greek philosophy and Latin poetry with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura which also gave inspiration to Enrico Baj’s series of works. However, Baj did not take long to withdraw from this faith in nuclear to develop an anti-nuclear stance critical to that scenario. It is a fact that the atomic disasters that occurred in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been crucial for artists to take a position regarding the danger – immediate or in the long run – of nuclear energy.

It also seems worthwhile mentioning the anti-nuclear feminist movement rising in the UK and the US by the end of the 1970s in the realm of increased interest in nuclear energy and nuclear power and its consequences. The focus on nuclear and radioactive culture in contemporary art deserves indeed a more extended argumentation. What seems relevant to underscore here is to recognize the set of works that Isabel Carvalho presents at this exhibition in Quadrado Azul gallery as a place to re-think and complexify questions that blurs the borders between art and science, and that also implies a convergence of political, social, and aesthetics stances.

Taking as a point of departure a way for “thinking from” (in Donna Haraway’s words) a situated history that brings her to metaphorically “mine” into her childhood memories, Isabel Carvalho explores a site in the north of Portugal, called Urgeiriça. Intersecting local history and material entanglements that interrogate and ask to take a stance on the role and the “response-ability” (continuing with Haraway's words) that the country had and has with regards to the mining of uranium as raw material for export, this exhibition entangles relations between nuclear industry, nuclear history, and aesthetics. If uranium mining was not and is not considered a nuclear process, it follows that different regulations are applied from those of nuclear power stations, and consequently to the monitoring and safety of the workers and the environment. These complex and political relations are synthesized by historian Gabrielle Hecht (2013) through the concept of “nuclearity”. And – as the title of one of the pieces presented testify – the inhabitants of the village claim a Mining Museum.

The set of works presented by Isabel Carvalho, whether anchored to a specific locale and time, seems to transcend any chronological definition and measure. A dimension of myth, ancient and modern, is convoked in a sort of untimed dimension. After coming across the piece Accidental sun, which immerses us in a double contrast of blue and yellow, we are encapsulated in a kind of timescale that extends from a pre-human to a post-human dimension through the Frieze of geoglyphs, Scintilograhpy, Claiming intra.activity towards the Civil Epistemologies: For a Mining Museum and The little lamps; the last inhabitants. This way, the artist creates symbolic relations between matter and the environmental processes in nuclear landscapes that alter conventional notions of time and space. As Karen Barad pointed out: “The temporality of radiation exposure is not one of immediacy; rather, it reworks this notion, which must then include generations before and to come.” (2017: G109)

The work of Isabel Carvalho evokes images of flourishing anatomy in full power. Breathing, as involuntary and natural as it may seem, connects us to a sort of ancestral way of living on the planet, and yet, in this context of dazzling colour effects, evocations of anatomical parts of bodies on a big scale, instil a sense of trouble and suspicion, that counterbalance a vibrant elegance and sensuality. Drawing with clay – as the artist declared once in her studio – might be considered a sort of printing process, imprinting on a surface to give it a shape.

Metaphorically it could translate the way radioactivity leaves its imprint on the landscape and all those living, lying, and even flying on it. An interrogation of human responsibility towards the past and present use of nuclear that does not attempt to recover a supposed idea of lost nature but rather to try to open toward new understandings to re-inhabit a damaged planet. Addressing social, political and aesthetic questions, the exhibition “Um Museu Mineiro” [A Mining Museum] opens a space for debate, to think about possible ways for a change, to a time to bloom.

2022