Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Aurora del Rio
This paper explores gift-giving and receiving in relation to radioactive inheritance, through artistic research. Finland is the first country in the world to open a deep repository for the storage of high-level radioactive waste. The buried scores will remain radioactive for at least the next 10.000 years, thus constituting a “poisonous gift” for the generations to come. Through examining how gift-giving can be related to danger, this research looks at different scenarios that such a gift can foster.
Previous plans for similar repositories have considered that, within the next 10.000 years, our current civilization may be interrupted. In the ‘80s and successively in the ‘90s, the US Department of Energy convened different teams of experts to propose ways to “mark” the burial site, with the intent to warn future visitors about the radioactive danger. Some proposals have looked at art as a way to communicate with future generations. The paper will present these examples and other, sometimes spontaneous, artistic attempts to produce such “markers”.
My artistic research looks at how myth and belief interfere with the creation of personal and collective realities, with a focus on radioactive contamination. This paper presents a video installation, “The Gift of Inheritance”, realized departing from conversations and visual images as a reflection on the idea of the dangerous gift. The work departs from questions such as: What does it mean to receive a gift that one cannot sense or experience? And: What possible myth or archetype can relate to this very story?
Aurora Del Rio is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University (FI) and a multidisciplinary artist. She holds a BA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts Bologna, and an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute Berlin/New York. Her research and artistic practice investigates how the reading of symbolic images interferes with the creation of personal and collective realities. Her current focus looks at radioactive contamination from a new materialist perspective. She is interested in the space of potentiality that originates when a definition is avoided or misplaced, and the liminal space of failure.