Csilla Nagy & Rita Süveges

Overcoming Time

Installation with one-channel video, ceramic objects, 2024

Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges were invited to work on a special, site-specific format for SALT. CLAY. ROCK. to create an artist-led field trip to one of our Hungarian research sites. The artists chose the small village of Boda, where exploratory drilling, by the Public Limited Company for Radioactive Waste Management (PURAM), is ongoing to determine whether the claystone formation below the village is a suitable final repository for the country's high-level radioactive waste. Csilla and Rita juxtapose the invisibility of these nuclear infrastructures—with test drilling sites marked only by inconspicuous blue containers on the outskirts of the village—and the deep time of nuclear half-life—the hidden, yet enduring presence of radioactive waste for millions of years to come.

A performative-participatory gathering took place at the “info park” of PURAM in Boda. It culminated in a communal pit-firing session on one of the hottest days of the summer in mid-July 2024. Using this ancient technique of transforming clay into ceramics, the artists created hexagonal shapes inspired by the power plant fuel rods. They were inspired as well as by“nuclear semiotics”, an interdisciplinary field of research, which tries to imagine how we can communicate about radioactive waste repositories’ toxicity and locations to future generations of humans and non-humans. How do we warn them? What symbols and language do we use? Could burnt clay be an effective means of communication? After all, ceramic objects are often the only remaining traces of ancient civilizations, from which archaeologists interpret how people once lived.

Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges use pit-firing as a metaphor to visualize the otherwise invisible infrastructure of nuclear waste storage, and grapple with “deep time” through a collective experience and witnessing of this material’s transformation. One of the biggest challenges of high-level radioactive waste containment is that it is heat-generating, which is why it needs to be stored in deep geological repositories, where its heat and radioactivity can be contained. For their installation within the exhibition the artists arrange the hexagonal shapes, pit-fired in Boda, in a long line, referencing nuclear fuel rods—the main source of high-level radioactive waste—as well as the drilling cores used in the geological investigation of potential repository sites. The fragile materiality of burnt clay associatively evokes the risks and dangers of nuclear waste storage.

Csilla and Rita also reflect on how a small village negotiates the responsibility of taking decisions that will impact generations to come. By intervening at the PURAM info park at the outskirts of Boda, they reclaim a space occupied by the official discourse of the radioactive waste management company with more critical perspectives. As part of their artist-led field trip, they organized an open-air roundtable including the mayor of Boda, a former uranium miner, a hydrogeologist working for PURAM, and an environmental activist from the nearby regional capital of Pécs. The lively and at times heated conversation, attended by mayors from the neighboring villages as well as geologists, engineers and other stakeholders in radioactive waste management, sketched out fascinating connections between regional uranium mining, geological investigations beginning during socialism and conditioned by political transitions and neoliberal change, and the perspectives of local mayors who strive to ensure futures for their villages through exploratory drilling compensation funds. Boda and the surrounding region was revealed as a “sacrifice zone” of local mining, with the human costs of extractivism yet to be accounted for; there is little information on how miners’ health has been impacted, other than through personal stories of illness, disability and premature death. This was shared during the roundtable, making tangible the need to more transparently inform and communicate the potential risks of hosting a final repository.

Mining history is also a history of solidarity—this is captured in the video created by the artists. The video poetically documents spontaneous moments of their in situ intervention including a moment  when miners and geologists start singing a miners’ song in a moving display of cross-disciplinary solidarity dedicated to the work below ground.

CSILLA NAGY
Csilla Nagy is a visual artist based in Galanta, Slovakia. Her practice is characterised by a search for ways and means of remembering. She often thematises the different layers and fragmented nature of memory, whether individual, family or collective. In recent years she has become interested in ceramics, integrating it into her artistic practice. She uses clay in conceptual and experimental ways, trying out ancient techniques or new methods, digging deep in the history of ceramics and exploring the latest technological approaches. She was awarded the Derkovits Grant, Visegrad Scholarship and Art scholarship of the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Since 2018 she is an Assistant Professor at J. Selye University, Komárno, Slovakia. https://www.csilla.xyz/

RITA SÜVEGES
Rita Süveges is a visual artist based in Budapest. Her practice is research-based, she works with communities through knowledge-sharing performative events, and for a white cube context she uses a wide range of installative media. Suveges's main topics are rooted in the ecological and climate crisis, her aims to repoliticize these issues into a societal understanding through the imaginative power of art. She is enrolled in the Doctor of Liberal Arts program of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In her upcoming dissertation, she is questioning geoengineering and techno-optimism from a feminist perspective.

She was awarded the TÓTalJOY Award, Smohay Award, Derkovits Grant, New National Excellence Grant, Visegrad Scholarship, and was nominated for the Strabag and the Esterhazy Art Award.

She took part in residency programs in Cité des Arts de Paris, ISCP New York, Meetfactory Prague, MQ/Q21 AIR Vienna, Balatorium, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen etc. Having several solo and group shows in Hungary, in the international context she exhibited in Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Off–Biennale Budapest and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin among others.

She is also a co-founder of xtro realm artist group, which since 2017 organizes reading circles, exhibitions, field trips dealing with the ecological theories that critique the anthropocentrism of contemporary thinking. She was an editor, author and designer of extrodæsia – Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World, and the Climate Imaginary Reader. Süveges was a curator of ACLIM! part of OFF–Biennale Budapest 2021. She was also a board member of the Association of Studio of Young Artists between 2018–2021.
http://www.ritasuveges.com/