Toxic Futures and the Creative Process

Program (October 27, 20221)

9.00–9.20 Introduction

9.20–10.00 Giulia Faccin + Jitka Králová // Mutual Core

10.00–10.40 Lenka Veselá // Endocrine Disruption Tracker Tool

10.40–11.20 Agnès Villette // La Hague's Nuclear Landscape

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12.40–13.20 Hana Komanová + Karolína Žižková // Fertiliser Rehab

13.20–14.00 Vojtěch Radakulan // Time of Lonely Shifts, or the World’s Most Expensive Museum + Nebula Core

Bios + Abstracts

Giulia Faccin is an independent visual researcher and mainly works with video essay-documentary formats and academic writing. Her research focuses on the relationship between allegedly collective narratives of escapism, future-making, and technology, drawing from colonial structures, visual studies, and sociology, mainly using (former and current) space explorations and metaverse(s) as case studies.

Jitka Králová is a social anthropologist based in the UK. Her research interests include issues around informality, precarity and political mobilisation, focusing on the postsocialist contexts. She currently works as an ethnographer on a large Horizon 2020 project POPREBEL which explores the rise of populism in CEE. She has also just started her PhD research, which investigates the social aspects of the phenomenon of financialization, focusing on household debt. 

Mutual Core
From fossil energy to green energy, from capitalism to green capitalism: what shape will the future take if built on principles that mirror, if not amplify, the same modes of existence and relations we struggle with and that ought to be revised? Mutual Core is an attempt to visualize our limits to imagining the future as well as the current system’s limits to envision a future beyond growth (as encapsulated in the paradigm of green capitalism). The project frames how nostalgia for the socialist past and the current trends towards a greener and a more sustainable future resonate with the existing profit-driven socio-economic models. It sets out to provide a visual metaphor for, and align with, our belief that past patterns can easily corrupt present actions and the imagining of the future.

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Lenka Veselá is a doctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Art Theory and History at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. In her work she connects a research of “synthetic bodies” (absorbing and secreting chemical substances of both industrial and more-than-human origin) with an interest in “synthetic knowledge” at the crossroads of art, activism and feminist technoscience. 

Endocrine Disruption Tracker Tool
Endocrine Disruption Tracker Tool (EDTT) is a speculative tool for the observation of affective symptoms caused by chemical endocrine disruptors (i.e. chemical substances disrupting hormonal systems). EDTT opposes an individualized understanding of the exposure to chemical substances and an individualized responsibility for the endurance of their impacts. Contrary to medical handbooks and self-tracking apps for the self-management of a personal medical condition that the tool refers to by its aesthetics, EDTT doesn’t offer neither individual diagnosis or prognosis, nor solutions in the form of medical interventions. Instead, it is a means of collective practice drawing attention to the necessity of a political response to the problem of environmental chemical disruptors and an involuntary exposure to them.

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Agnès Villette is an artist and a doctoral researcher at Winchester School of Arts, UK. She also works as a journalist, translator and educator. Her research in nuclear aesthetics and culture investigates the radioactive ruins of the Norman territory of La Hague in Normandy, France. Trained in literature, she gained a degree in modern literature at Paris Sorbonne and in art photography at London College of Communication.

La Hague's Nuclear Landscape. Technological Thresholds and Toxic Threads
Agnès Villette explores the slow violence of the past 60 years of nuclear military-industrial developments in La Hague’s Norman peninsula. Civil and military nuclear activities have left multiple toxic threads scattered around the landscape. These material witnesses informLa Hague’s natural archives and delineate a nuclear zone where iterative accidents and leakages define a geography of uncertainty. With the help of data, archives, and materials, Agnès re-assembles the narratives or past and forgotten accidents.  

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Hana Komanová is a biodesigner currently based in London, researching textile & material lifecycles and their impact on soil health through decomposition. Her work applies biological processes into design practices.

Karolína Žižková is an environmental anthropologist based in North Bohemia. She is interested in land, lithium and coal mining, landscape transformation, and science and technology studies. Using the perspectives of ecological economics and political ecology, she focuses on sociotechnical imaginaries of the future, discourse and power structures related to these topics.

Fertiliser Rehab: A Speculative Exploration of Post-Fertiliser rehabilitation
How are crops and people going to react to the unavailability of industrial fertilisers? Phosphorus is an essential element for all living beings and also one of three main components of synthetic fertilisers current agriculture depends on. Prior to human intervention, wild plants developed strategies to secure this scarce nutrient, such as evolving extensive root systems or excreting chemicals to liberate it from the soil. Assuming continuing abundance of synthetic fertilisers and easy access to phosphorus, these abilities were traded in by breeders for fast growth in many cultivars. However, phosphate rock, the primary source of phosphorus, is a finite resource. It took 10-15 million years to form and extraction is reaching its limits, with the maximum extraction rate – peak phosphorus – estimated in 2030. The Fertiliser Rehab is a fictitious service set in post peak phosphorus times, exploring possible experimentations with plants’ properties, as well as sourcing phosphorus elsewhere.

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Vojtěch Radakulan holds a degree in Sculpture (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague) and in Architecture ( Academy of Fine Arts in Prague). Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction at the Faculty of Electronics, Czech Technical University. He works in the field of fine arts, architecture and game design. In the core of his work lies the examination of simulations and the creation of fictional worlds.

Time of Lonely Shifts, or the World’s Most Expensive Museum + Nebula Core
Vojtěch Radakulan will present two artistic projects – one about a completed but never activated nuclear power plant Zwentendorf in Lower Austria (Period of Lonely Shifts, or the World’s Most Expensive Museum) and an older student project about the Temelín nuclear power plant (Nebula Core). Both projects are based on the author’s research, authentic experiences and historical facts that are connected through subjective artistic practice. The projects address the topic of fear or enthusiasm provoked by nuclear facilities, the question of a relationship between the experts and the general public in the context of nuclear energy or the political implications of constructions extending to the present – all viewed from an artistic perspective.