Future Memory and the Ungrounding Ground

Weir presents work from an ongoing art research project – Pazugoo. This draws on research at the H.A.D.E.S laboratory in Belgium, alongside residency work with Z33.

Weir has been interested in the materiality of nuclear waste, in terms of how its immense half-lives impact on thought in the present, ungrounding the centrality of human experience. Specifically, he has focused on how this ‘ungrounding’ process is not foregrounded in the ‘marker’ traditions of RK&M, which tend to draw on existing sculptural languages and projections of unchanged futures and people. He has also been critical of how the heroic and geographically fixed narrative of the marker as monument excludes those still impacted through toxicity, understood more ecologically through a post-colonial lens.

Against this, he has proposed a speculative model of nuclear waste marker that:
(i) is distributed across multiple ecologically connected sites,
(ii) is rooted in the earth by being buried underground,
(iii) intersects with local myths of ground and flight,
(iv) has an unknown future viewer, so acts as a speculative catalyst for reshaping the imaginary of the present.

The format he develops for this is local group workshops, leading to 3d-printed demons, which are buried as markers of radioactive waste sites. This has developed alongside writing and theoretical research. For this short presentation, Weir gives a brief overview of the project, focusing on where it is now. He claims, through this, that art in its criticality is vital in re-imagining nuclear futures.