March 28, 2023

Last night we failed to charge our e-car, which made us late for a meeting at the Gorleben Archive, since we now had to take time to decipher the instructions for the station and correctly charge the car battery. In the end, we split up: some of us went into the meeting while others stayed behind to try and connect the car. Unfortunately, we still didn’t manage to charge it, so one of us had to drive the car from our next meeting location—the Beluga Triangle—to the nearest e-car charging station, accompanied by one of our hosts in their combustion-engine car. We left our car there to charge, drove back to the meeting, and were later taken again to retrieve the car at the end of the session. This dynamic repeated itself, and our tightly planned schedule began shifting around the need to charge the car. In many cases, this meant one of us had to miss parts of the program to manage the charging or ended up spending the evening at the fueling station with a junk food dinner. This was one of two times we rented an electric car during our program. Another time (September 16, 2024), Julia from the working group and the artist Sonya Schönberger traveled from Leipzig and Berlin by train to Magdeburg, where they rented an e-car to visit the final repository in Morsleben. This trip went very smoothly—as no charging was needed during the 100 km journey—although the working group member was quite nervous beforehand due to previous experiences. An e-car has one third of the emissions of a combustion-engine vehicle.

Emissions from the curatorial research trip in Germany: 310 kg CO₂e