Bladerunner was set in November 2019

 

A collaboration between Alex Moulis, Andrea Steves, Crunch Kefford, Gem Romuld, Jessie Boylan, Linda Dement (code), Tessa Rex & Yul Scarf.
Curated by Tessa Rex & Yul Scarf
Kings ARI, Melbourne, November, 2019.

Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner was set in a nuclear dystopia in November 2019.

and here we are

The earth is powdered with radioactive isotopes, like icing sugar on a cake. A thin yellow line registers in our teeth, our bones and in the geologic strata. Nuclear dystopia is here and it is unequally distributed.

Did you know that Blade Runner was set in November 2019? This show is an inhalation, calm and terrifying. It opens a space to contemplate a juncture in time, to consider Ridley Scott’s speculative future in relation to our current nuclear reality.

In August of 2019, seven artists and friends travelled to Maralinga on Anangu Country, South Australia—one of three sites of British nuclear testing in Australia. We shared histories of documenting, campaigning and working alongside communities who have been impacted by the radioactive chain—from uranium mining to nuclear testing and the ‘management’ of radioactive waste—in this continent and beyond. We set out to consider the nuclear present and what it means to ‘record the future that is already here’* and to learn from those impacted by nuclear tests at Maralinga and the radioactive fallout that spread all across this continent.

*Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages

A room in Naarm (Melbourne) is awash with orange and blue light, party tassel curtains hang from the ceiling beams. Four fans push air around the space making the curtains dance and shimmer, agitating the light so that it spreads through the room. Headphones contain the sounds of Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and English; stories of pain, loss, strength and resistance. In the corner, a desk invites visitors to play Atomic Mix’n’Match, a twisted game of nuclear universals overlaid on sites affected by the nuclear industrial complex. Seven ceramic balloons lie on the floor, cast in footage from Maralinga and Blade Runner.

A short clip of the installation at Kings ARI.

 

Dispersal

2019-2022

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this audio piece contains voices of deceased persons.

Nuclear events destroy time; life fundamentally changes in an instant. Wind carries atomic survivor stories across place and time as it continues to spread radioactivity across the surface of former nuclear test sites and beyond. Nuclear events unfold forever: the concept of “before” and “after” a nuclear explosion is intangible, as there is no access to the before, and the after will never arrive.*

Communities living downwind of nuclear test sites, where airborne radioactive contamination is the greatest, have come to be known as “Downwinders”—the people most affected by the irreversible long half-life (24,000 years) of plutonium and other radionuclides.

This sound and video work centres on the ungraspable and nebulous experience, effects and affective nature of wind and explores the ways in which the wind holds symbolic resonance in the stories and experiences of atomic-survivor communities, as well as the non-human landscapes where nuclear bombs were detonated.

The sound work utilises code created from wind data (recorded by BoM between 1955-1967 at Maralinga in South Australia) as well as testimony from atomic survivor communities in Australia. Voices and atmospheric sounds change in intensity, volume and pitch—depending on the speed and direction of the wind—forming layers of connected and dispersed stories, linking lives affected by nuclear events together in a never-ending, constantly shifting soundscape. Voices heard are: Yami Lester (Yankunytjatjara), Russell Bryant, Rita Bryant and family (Pitjantjatjara), Aunty Sue Coleman-Haseldine (Kokatha), Avon Hudson (Maralinga nuclear veteran), as well as camp sounds and some voices of the artists.

The video pans across the Maralinga landscape, connecting the voices to places synonymous with this chapter of Australia’s dark history, a history which is still unfolding. 

*Cole, D. R., Dolphijn, R., Bradley, J. P. N. (2016) Fukushima: The Geo-trauma of a Futural Wave, Trans–Humanities, Vol. 9 No. 3, p 219.

Read more about this project in ‘The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives)’ by Yhonnie Scarce and Lisa Radford. https://www.artandaustralia.com/online/image-not-nothing-concrete-archives/october-editorial

 

Trinitite, Maralinga, South Australia, 2019

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