Geo-Fictionalising the Atomic Priesthood: Pazugoo and the Future Relic

Abstract

The paper focuses on deep geological repositories, designed for safe long-term storage of nuclear waste, and analyses the RK&M project, which considers how these sites could be marked and remembered for imagined futures. The project, it is argued, mirrors some of the universalising problems of the term “Anthropocene”. Counter to this, the author describes the ongoing art research project Pazugoo, which draws on myths of flight and the earth, local to specific radioactive burial sites, generating digital designs for composite demons, which are figures of personification for the waste, buried for future unearthing, unknown by whom or by what. The addressee of the work differs from the imagined addressee of the RK&M project, offering a speculative viewpoint on the present moment, in its entanglement with deep times past and future.

Keywords

• anthropocene
• art practice
• deep time
• materiality
• nuclear waste
• Pazugoo