Radiation Borders

Descriptions provided by the artists

Dion Smith-Dokkie, DECENTRALIZED TREATY 8 AUTHORITY
VOLUME 3: UNCHAGA-ASINIYWACIYA CONFLUENCE APPENDIX A, ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2207, FEBRUARY
Text and digital illustrations, 8 ½ x 11, 2018

I use Google Earth satellite images as source material for digital collages about land, community and transformation. This image forms part of a series depicting northeastern British Columbia in the year 2207. The Nuclear and Oil Winters, and the concurrent dissolution of the Canadian State, triggered the development of the Decentralized Treaty 8 Authority (DT8A) as a sovereign, Indigenous-led body in the region. Lingering environmental dangers necessitated the designation of large, encompassing exclusion zones. This map and others illustrate how to safely navigate these saturated, unnatural landscapes. One image in this work was commissioned by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures as part of the Illustrating the Future Imaginary series.

Inas Halabi, We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction
Single channel digital video with sound and 35mm slides, Arabic with English subtitles, 11:59 min, 2019

We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction has an outward subject and an inward one. Via a gear-shifting combination of conversation, interview and expressive location footage, it probes the possible burial of nuclear waste in the South of the West Bank. But as the footage cycles between fragmented conversations with a nuclear physicist and landscapes that are uneasily underscored by what we hear (and sometimes tinted an ill-omened red), another context emerges. In various ways, the delivery of information is thwarted, withheld, or delayed , and the film comes to turn on issues of representation and conveyance. The isotope Cesium 137, invisible but deadly, could be seen as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility – the systemic networks of power and control in the region – and this work as a meditation on how to account for the un-filmable but inexorable.

Elizabeth Tannie Lewin, Nuclear Set (Rough draft)
Digital video, 10 min, 2017–present

The invention of the internal combustion engine and broadcast radio marks a dramatic shift in our inherent understanding of time and space. It also marks a moment in history when the conventions of war begin to rapidly change.

Nuclear Set interweaves Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, poetry by Maquis, Rene Char, the journals of Italian Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, historical footage of the United States’ nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, and a 3D video game landscape of Bikini Atoll to speculate a future that will survive our extinction.

Hanae Utamura, Spring Water, Fault, Body
Single channel digital video with sound, Japanese with English subtitles, 16:34 min, 2021

This work is based on performance workshops filmed during the fall 2019 residency at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center (ACAC), as well as footage shot at various locations in Aomori Prefecture and at the Horonobe Underground Research Center in Horonobe, Hokkaido, which conducts research and development on geological disposal technology for high-level radioactive waste. The structural video work Spring Water, Faults, and the Body is a performance piece.

This video consists of two parts. Superimposed onto the first part is the voice of the artist reading aloud the memoirs of her scientist father, who used to be involved in the field of nuclear energy engineering. Utamura recounts how the “I” in the memoir grew up among animals and nature, how he became fascinated with the phenomena of the natural world, and how he chose nuclear energy as his specialty amid the turbulence of Japan’ s period of rapid economic growth. In contemporary society, all issues are intricately intertwined with each other. Within this work, representations of human beings, nature, and animals are equivalent substitutes for each other. “I,” the father, is represented as a tree, while the family, a unit connected by blood, is linked to other species on this Earth. The temporal axis of human life is superimposed on the Earth’ s temporal axis, which encompasses the 4.5 billion years since it came into being.

The scene of a goat giving birth that “I” saw as a child is superimposed onto the geological strata of the buried forest from the last glacial age in Dekijima, Aomori Prefecture, where coniferous trees from about 28,000 years ago are preserved in the strata. The scene where the goat finishes giving birth and eats up the placenta is superimposed onto images of strata of reddish-brown cyanobacteria in a buried forest trickling with raindrops. Cyanobacteria were the first to photosynthesize and deliver oxygen to the Earth 3 to 2.5 billion years ago.

The tree as the “I” of the memoir is represented by silver ribbons flowing from the branches of the tree that represent light and invisible wind currents. In the memoir, these silver ribbons might represent the trends of the times, or instruments of experimentation. In the final scene in the sky overhead in the first part, the artist walks on a mixture of ice and water that could break at any moment, and encounters a tree with silver ribbons fluttering in her direction, ending the first part. The scene of the spring water in Gudari Swamp in Tashirotai, where melted snow from Hakkōda in Aomori gushes out, represents an emission of the memories of life that have continued from our human ancestors, a recurrence of the subject — circulating water released by tracing the path of a fault plane created by fluctuations in the Earth’ s crust. The work is recounted through the actions of the artist, who became a mother during its creation, as she reads aloud the childhood memoirs of her Father. The difference between the voice of the speaker and the subject of the story naturally raises the question of the history of gender differences. This reading aloud is an act of performance that imagines new subjects, including non-humans, in order to transcend the concept of the “individual” brought about by modernity.

The second part takes place underground, where research is being conducted at the Horonobe Underground Research Center, becoming a space-time where the past and future intersect, with no humans as subjects. The subjects of the story are multiple “others,” such as machines, technology, and geological formations. The only language involved is the English subtitles: the voices of the speakers disappear. The “fault” in the subtitle “Who is at fault?” is used with the double meaning of both a geological fault, and responsibility.

The second part features vitrified nuclear waste to be disposed of in a geological formation. Glass is a material used in vitrification, a technology for solidifying nuclear fission products (high-level radioactive liquid waste) together with glass materials. The glass materials of the future, which store the energy waste that has sustained our civilization, will be disposed of after passing through nuclear power plants and reprocessing plants, hidden in deep geological strata. The fault planes of the strata distorted by human mining operations move with the howling of the Earth. They also provoke earthquakes caused by human activities that may occur in the future.

Filming Location: Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (ACAC), Aomori Hotoke-ga-ura seashore, The Submerged Forest in Dekijima seashore, Spring Water of Gudari Swamp Higashi Hakkouda Tashiro Highlands, Hokkaido Horonobe Underground Research Center
Coorporation: Aomori Contemporary Art Centre(ACAC), istyle Art and Sports Foundation, Squeaky Wheel’ s Workspace Residency.
Participants of Performance and Workshop: Satoko Kawamura, Sonoko Shibata, Daisuke Sugiura, Miho Izumida
Workshop filmed by: Masanori Yokoyama
Sound for Chapter 1: ‘Echo Fantasy I’ (Composed by Eva-Maria Houben, Performed by Ensemble Ordinary Affects)
Sound for Chapter 2: Aaron Michael Smith

Dion Smith-Dokkie is a painter and visual artist who resides on Treaty 8 territory in the Peace River region of BC and Alberta. In broad strokes, he is interested in location and place, infrastructure, and communication. Smith-Dokkie’s work has shown at a number of venues in Vancouver, including the Polygon Gallery, Gallery Gachet, and Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery; he has also shown work at The Bows in Calgary and at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. Alongside art practice, he enjoys writing about art, having published in ReIssue, Galleries West, SAD Magazine, and other venues. Dion is of mixed European-Indigenous (Dunne-za, Cree, Saulteaux) descent and is a member of West Moberly First Nations.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Tannie Lewin is a digital media artist interested in: technology, landscape, identity, disappearance, history, and utopia.

Hanae Utamura is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist and an educator based in New York and Tokyo. Her work engages with historical memory, questioning the notion of progress in modernity, ecology and technology. Utamura’s media include video, performance, installation, and sculpture. She connects human beings and earth, using the physical human body as a conduit. She explores negotiations and conflicts between the human and the non-human, and how all the varieties of the wills of life manifest such as in the field of science. By decentralizing the human perspective, Utamura diversifies historical narratives, and enters the imagination of nature. She received her Master of Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and her Bachelor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Utamura has received support through numerous international residencies and fellowships including International Studio & Curatorial Program (NY), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), Art Omi (Hudson, U.S.), Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Aomori Contemporary Art Center (Japan), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Changdong Art Studio (Seoul, S.Korea), Seoul Art Space_GEUMCHEON (Seoul, S.Korea), Florence Trust (London, U.K.) and more. She has been awarded NYSCA grant, More Art Engaging Artist Fellowship, NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, Shiseido Art Egg Award, Grant program by the Japanese Ministry of Culture, the Pola Art Foundation, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary Award, and Axis/Florence Trust Award. She has been exhibited extensively in Asia, Europe and U.S. She was a visiting scholar at New York University in 2019, supported by Japanese Ministry of Culture, Japanese government as a part of Japan – United States Exchange Friendship Program in the Art.

Inas Halabi (b.1988, Palestine) is an Artist/Filmmaker. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that overlooked or suppressed histories have on contemporary life. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Luleå Biennial (2024), Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2023), de Appel Amsterdam (solo 2023), Showroom London (solo 2022), Europalia Festival, Brussels (2021), Silent Green Betonhalle, Berlin (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020); and Film at Lincoln Center, USA (2020). Her recent work has been supported by Amarte, Amsterdam Fonds Voor de Kunst (AFK), Mondriaan Fund, and Sharjah Art Foundation. She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.