Overcoming Time Artist-led Field Trip and Community Pit-Firing with Csilla Nagy & Rita Süveges

Artists: Csilla Nagy, Rita Süveges

Boda is a small village in Southwest Hungary, which is currently being investigated as a site for the country’s future repository for high-level radioactive waste due the claystone formation it is situated on. In the form of an artist-led field trip, Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges give insight into their artistic research process abd invite participants to one of the test drilling sites to contemplate questions around deep time, the responsibility for decisions impacting several generations and the ways in which a small village community negotiates this.

The artists initiate a performative-participatory gathering, accompanied by a communal pit-firing session. Using the most ancient technique of transforming clay into ceramics, they create shapes and objects inspired by ‘nuclear semiotics’, an interdisciplinary field of research asking how we imagine communication with future generations (human or non-human living beings) about the location and the toxicity of the nuclear waste repository? How do we warn them? What symbols, what language will we use? Is claystone the adequate material to store this waste and burnt clay the adequate means of communicating about it? After all, ceramic objects are often the only traces of ancient civilizations, from which archaeologists try to understand how people had once worked and lived.

Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges see pit-firing as a metaphor, as a way of making visible the otherwise invisible infrastructure of nuclear waste storage, of grappling with “deep time” through experiencing and witnessing this transformation of materials, which also points to one of the dangers of high-level radioactive waste and its containment: it is heat-generating waste, which is why it needs to be stored in mined deep geological repositories, where not only its toxic radioactivity, but also the heat it generates can be contained.

The pit-firing session led by the artists, will be accompanied by the interventions of several invited guests—a former uranium miner from the region; the village’s mayor who is a key figure in the decision-making about the future repository; an environmental activist and organiser from Pécs, who strives to raise critical awareness about the repository in the local community; and an expert from the research institute investigating the long-term safety of the repository envisioned in Boda. After sharing their respective perspectives, the guests will engage in a collective, open conversation with the artists and the participants of the gathering.

Invited guests: Gyula Dankó (hydrogeologist, PURAM - Public Limited Company for Radioactive Waste Management); Júlia Konkoly-Thege (activist and community organizier, Green Youth Pécs); Győző Kovács (mayor, Boda); László Wesztl (former uranium miner, currently community organiser, Pécs)

Artists: Csilla Nagy, Rita Süveges

SALT. CLAY. ROCK. curatorial team: Katalin Erdődi, Marc Herbst, Julia Kurz, Virág Major-Kremer, Vincent Schier.

Production: Darabos Dina, Kovács Kinga

Partner: nGbK - neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin

Supported by: Zero programme / German Federal Cultural Fund, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Berlin Senate - Department for Culture and Community

Special thanks: Municipality of Boda