Forensic Poetics. For our granddaughters.
On Katrin Hornek's testing grounds
•
by Anne Faucheret
•
with Invisible Committee • Anna L. Tsing • Zosia Holubowska • Rosi Braidotti • Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark • Joseph Masco • Sabina Holzer & Katrin Hornek • Serpil Oppermann • Karen Barad • Heather Swanson & Anna L. Tsing & Nils Bubandt & Elaine Gan • Tōge Sankichi • Jim Dangerfield • Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner • Karin Pauer • Stacy Alaimo • Yvonne Volkart • Donna Haraway, Brian Holmes & Jeremy Bolen & Brian Kirkbride.
•
Essay published in the catalogue of the artist's solo exhibition testing grounds held at Secession Vienna • 2024
"At the apex of his insanity, Man has even proclaimed himself a "geological force," going so far as to give the name of his species to a phase of the life of the planet: he's taken to speaking of an "anthropocene." For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it's to accuse himself of having trashed everything – the seas and the skies, the ground and what's underground – even if it's to confess his guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and animal species. But what's remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with the world. He calculates the rate at which the ice pack is disappearing. He measures the extermination of the non-human forms of life. As to climate change, he doesn't talk about it based on his sensible experience – a bird that doesn't return in the same period of the year, an insect whose sounds aren't heard anymore, a plant that no longer flowers at the same time as some other one. He talks about it scientifically with numbers and averages. […]
The objective disaster serves mainly to mask another disaster, this one more obvious still and more massive. The exhaustion of natural resources is probably less advanced than the exhaustion of subjective resources, of vital resources, that is afflicting our contemporaries. If so much satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the environment it's largely because this veils the shocking destruction of interiorities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species extinction is an image of our souls in shreds, a reflection of our absence from the world, of our personal inability to inhabit it. Fukushima offers the spectacle of this complete failure of man and his mastery, which only produces ruins – and those Japanese plains, intact in appearance but where no one can live for decades. A never-ending decomposition that is finishing the job of making the world uninhabitable: the West will have ended up borrowing its mode of existence from what it fears the most: radioactive waste."
– Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 2014
" Grasping the atom was the culmination of human dreams of controlling nature. It was also the beginning of those dreams' undoing. The bomb at Hiroshima changed things. Suddenly, we became aware that humans could destroy the livability of the planet – whether intentionally or otherwise. This awareness only increased as we learned about pollution, mass extinction, and climate change. One half of current precarity is the fate of the earth: what kinds of human disturbances can we live with? Despite talk of sustainability, how much chance do we have for passing a habitable environment to our multispecies descendants?"
– Anna L. Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, On the Possibility of Life on Capitalist Ruins, 2015
It's first the atmosphere that grabs my body. With it, a feeling. The space is dark, the air seems thick, it seems to be twilight. The graduations of black and anthracite, punctuated by the whiteness of the walls and of some sand piles, create an artificial, monochromatic, motionless landscape. An artificially terraformed futuristic landscape. Paradoxically, the space that opens wide before me can be embraced in one glance, but not really grasped: the vision is blurred by the dark shades overlapping, by tiny topographical variations, by reflections on surfaces and by an uncanny soundscape. Thus, my body needs to plunge into the space to apprehend it, to listen to it, to feel it underfoot, to touch it, to probe it and, perhaps, to linger therein, despite a vague prescience that I will not come out unscathed.
The sound envelops my body like a spell. It calls me to stay. It opens up to other sensible and intelligible layers and connects them with each other. Katrin Hornek invited sound artist Zosia Holubowska to create an eerie composition for the exhibition, oscillating between concrete experimental and serial electronic music, made of estranged sound captures or synthetized sounds. I remember the chapter names in the artist’s shared folder: coral, empty ruins, turtle, wet cave, hydrogen scales, portal, siren. Filling unevenly the space from varied broadcasting points, at times intense and at times evanescent, at times mechanic and at times organic, at times inward-looking and at times vibrating, at times dark and at times – rarely – joyful, the composition plays with the materiality of sound, emphasizing on the very physicality of sonic waves and on its touching qualities. The sound waves don't just hit my eardrums: they seem to get into my skin, like radiation. Sound connects everything, taking up the bodies and rebalancing signs and references in the system of the exhibition.
"sea sound / coral / underwater / beach / atmospheric sound / wind / touching coral / hot summer / trickle / drizzle / up and down movement / empty ruins / crackling snow / crackling glass / excavation / scraping sound / wind remote / birds / semipalatinsk tundra / burning sound / uncanny / piercing / resonating / noise/ inside sounds / hair / skin / bones / moisture / small space / intimate / hidden / played from one corner at a time / breathing / instrumental portals / sirens / drone / airplane / inside of the reactor / sci-fi vibe / future ruins / concrete dome / reverberation / endless space / ominous / contradicting rhythms / confusing / upsetting / digging / drilling / water drops / falling things / scanning / polarized / petrified / emotional / darkness /"
– Zosia Holubowska, List of Sounds, 2023
The low topography out of dark matter expands on the floor and enter in tension with the high ceiling. Rubber granulate carpet pieces coming from recycled car tires, rise here and there into platforms and are punctually adorned with piles of white marble sand. Turtle-shaped colored objects are disseminated in the space. The mat and soft appearing floor is interrupted by pools of black water stretching across the space and reflect the ceiling. The zenithal glass panels have been covered by transparent filters with black printed patterns. At first glance abstract, these unveil as a topography too. The image derives from a sonography of the Bikini Atoll’s seabed, realized in 2019 by Arthur Trambanis’ research team around the crater left by the underwater explosion of the atomic test bomb Baker from 1945. The oblong spots are the wrecks of the destroyed ships used in the tests. Katrin Hornek takes the scars from the bottom of the sea to the roof of the exhibition space, and transforms them into a light filter. For both the ceiling and the floor, she plays with effects of enlargement and reduction. The basins filled with water figure gigantic chromosomes 9 and 22 – those predominantly storing information about the bones, which in turn absorb plutonium and other nuclides, confusing them with calcium. Atomic radiation left its traces everywhere, at every scale, from the microscopic atom up to the planetary surface.
"Our era has turned visualization into the ultimate form of control. […] This is of special concern from a feminist perspective, because it tends to reinstate a hierarchy of bodily perception which over-privileges vision over other senses, especially touch and sound. […] Postmodern feminist knowledge claims are grounded in life experiences and consequently mark radical forms of re-embodiment. But they also need to be dynamic – or nomadic - and allow for shifts of location and multiplicity."
– Rosi Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a Difference, 1996
The map of nuclear devastation on the ceiling determines the brightness of the exhibition and symbolizes the lens through which the world can be sensed in the Atomic Age, in the Age of Global Fallout, in the Anthropocene. Vision and visual technologies frame this new geological age – data visualization, satellite imagery, climate modelling (where radionuclides have been used to make flows visible). At the same time, radiation, being invisible for most capturing devices, challenges visual and representational systems as well as it expanded spatial and temporal scales, from the ultra-quick to the ultra-long geological time.
The paradox of the visualization as ultimate form of control and the sensorial and cognitive estrangement is what characterize the atomic condition. A condition that was gradually established by extractive imperialist capitalism, and accelerated during the Second World War with the exploitation of atomic energy for military purposes, the explosion of the first nuclear bombs decimating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the following 540 aerial and submarine nuclear tests perpetrated between 1945 and 1980 on territories stolen from their human and more-than-human inhabitants.
"Enola Gay / You should have stayed at home yesterday / Ah-ha, words can't describe / The feeling and the way you lied / These games you play / They're gonna end in more than tears someday / Ah-ha, Enola Gay / It shouldn't ever have to end this way / It's 8:15 / And that's the time that it's always been / We got your message on the radio / Conditions normal and you're coming home / Enola Gay / Is mother proud of little boy today? / Ah-ha, this kiss you give / It's never ever going to fade away / Enola Gay / It shouldn't ever have to end this way / Ah-ha, Enola Gay / It shouldn't fade in our dreams away."
– Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Enola Gay, 1980
The exhibition’s title testing grounds straight forwardly designates those nuclear bomb test sites, underwater or on land, installed on territories that were appropriated and then devastated, “for the sake of peace”. And here we are, right into the testing grounds of human’s hybris, ignorance, and denial. The Semipalatinsk site in Northeast Kazakhstan was once the very secret main testing venue for Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. More than 450 bombs were detonated there between 1949 and 1989 and affected more than a million people, who were misinformed and reduced to silence.
Among other sites appearing in the web of stories enshrined in the exhibition, the infamous Bikini-Atoll in the Marshall Islands, an important US tests’ site in the Pacific Ocean, reoccurs several times. Operation Crossroads, consisting of two realized tests under code names Able and afore-mentioned Baker was the first series of post-war nuclear tests carried out by the US in July 1946. It marked a headlong rush into Western Man’s destructive ambitions, starting the arms race, the Cold War and an endless list of nuclear tests – following the deterrence principle.
Almost ten years later, the Operation Castle (March 1954) marked a new stage in the nuclear race with the first hydrogen bomb. The Castel Bravo bomb, the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the US, also took place at the Bikini-Atoll, exceeded more than two times the foreseen yield and contaminated a large surrounding area. The fallout, the heaviest of which was in the form of pulverized surface coral, fell on residents of neighboring atolls, while particulate and gaseous fallout spread around the world. The inhabitants of the surrounding islands were not evacuated until three days later and suffered radiation sickness. Most of the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel were also contaminated by the fallout and experienced acute radiation syndrome. The blast incited a strong international reaction over atmospheric thermonuclear testing.
"[T]he environment itself has been transformed into a potentially deadly space, remaking clouds and air as dangerous entities. The atomic bomb transforms the atmosphere on which living beings depend, converting it from a life support system into something now suspect, potentially loaded at any moment with invisible and harmful elements. […]
Fallout is thus an environmental flow, one that matters to public health and safety but that also requires a new form of everyday perception and governance. Fallout positions the citizen less as a national subject than as an earth dweller, one increasingly at risk, as Tim Choy would put it, simply for being a "breather”. This conversion of atmosphere, from the most rudimentary domain of life into an uncertain circulation, also directly challenges the territorial vision of the national security state system, as international borders and security states are rendered irrelevant by windborne industrial effects within changeable earth systems."
– Joseph Masco, The Age of Fallout, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 2015
Through Fall out, the testing ground is also Europe, it is Austria – “neutral” country refusing any military alliance, and anti-atomic country, which never opened a single power plant. Still, Vienna hosts since 1957 the International Atomic Energy Agency, promoting worldwide the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the increase of nuclear safety as well as the verification of States’ compliance under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime. Besides, the only urban sample to date used as a marker of the Anthropocene has been taken from Vienna’s underground at Karlsplatz. Finally, the testing ground is also the main hall of the Secession, a modernist island created by artists in the city center at the beginning of the 20th century, contained and porous at once.
"The particles were brought here by the winds and the rain.
I’m touching the layer with my hand now...
…At the same time…what I am actually touching is parts of the Bikini Atoll, the Novaya Zemlya test site, the Nevada test site, and all the others…Hundreds of atomic blasts…And these atomic blasts vaporized numerous tons of earth in these so-called Test Sites. The closer the bombs detonated to the ground, the more soil and other materials were drawn upwards, sucked upwards – imagine! – inside the rising fireball… Like a fierce stream of vaporized matter, all sucked into a massive, boiling cloud… The radioactive particles attached to this vaporized earth and together, they were carried by global winds … they traveled on coral dust, desert sands, tundra dust…
and settled right here. At Karlsplatz [...]
And also… in my bones. “Plutonium is a bone seeker” they say…because it mimics calcium... and its chemical composition looks almost the same. yes…we simply inhale this plutonium… and it settles directly in our bone marrow, which is hungry for calcium, but gets plutonium instead. [...]
This plutonium in my body turns me – or rather, turns all of us into weird artifacts. Recorders of events that happened before my generation was born. And it marks our belonging to the epoch of the Anthropocene for which the marker will be plutonium 239, which is now part of our bodies…We are evidence… [...]
And the Karlsplatz soil sample? It will be used as an auxiliary measurement to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene…. I mean, in geological terms."
– Katrin Hornek & Sabina Holzer, Karlsplatz Grube, Messenger Text (#x, 2024
Through a polymorphic, polyphonic, dispersed and diffracted account, Katrin Hornek makes graspable the extent to which atomic energy, its effects and its narratives have penetrated every aspect of life on earth, right down to the smallest nooks and crannies, in the atmosphere, in the soil, in the organisms, in the cells, reorganizing the matter and its sedimentation but reorganizing at the same time our imaginations. The artist has collected a wide range of archival, documentary, scientific material, from general vulgarization to former classified information, from official propaganda to vernacular stories, which she incorporates, translates, fragments and disseminates through matter, objects and devices working like communicating vessels – communicating with the visitors and with each other.
Turtle-shaped colored objects populate the landscape of the exhibition space. The surfaces of the turtles change from object to object: warm or cold, smooth or rough, gelled or hard. Each object is casted in a different material, color, texture and body shape. Encased in the turtles-shaped cases, I discover smartphones, where several voices are recorded either in written or in oral form – developed in collaboration with the writer and performance artist Sabina Holzer. I hold a black turtle to my ear and listen to a dreamscape written by the two. It reminds me of the cynical origin of the eponymous piece of clothing bikini. The fate of the Bikini-Atoll, site of pride and test for the ones who occupied it, and site of terror, anger and longing for those who still inhabit it, can be traced via several narrative paths. A poem by native writer Kathi Jetñil-Kijner, from the Marshall Islands, calls against oblivion and anonymity. Turtle shells retain evidence of previous nuclear contamination—much like how tree rings hold information on the past environment. The multiple turtles in space evoke the sacred and cherished animal in the Pacific zone. Associated in numerous cosmogonies and mythologies in the Pacific Ocean with protection, shelter, and luck, they take in the exhibition the role of carriers and protectors. They protect the messages they carry, they bear in their bodies some memories, for the future.
"I’ve always wanted to tell you that hmm … that meeting you was one of the most powerful more-than-human encounters I’ve ever had …
It was 20 years ago, during that warm summer...
I still see you and your gang of sea turtles crawling onto land.
I’d never seen this before. [...]
I’m telling you all this because yesterday I read an article that really blew my mind.
It was about scientists who were searching for uranium traces in the shells of sea turtles and tortoises. They collected them around former nuclear testing grounds or at sites of modern and contemporary nuclear activities. [...]
They say: “Unusual uranium signatures were found in a green sea turtle from Marshall Islands. The same signal appeared in a desert tortoise in Utah, near the Nevada Test Site.”
And the story that touched me the most, was the one of a turtle from Oakridge Tennessee. The turtle was collected close to a complex called Y-12, a factory that has been producing and is still assembled components for nuclear weapons since World War 2.
The shell layer that was most contaminated was the one the turtle was born with. This suggests that the mother was even more contaminated…, right? Transferring these signals on to her children."
– Katrin Hornek & Sabina Holzer, Voice Message to a Turtle , Messenger Text (#x), 2024
"So we were sitting at her desk… and she was tapping her toes against a cardboard box under the table… You know, this typical tapping sound. And she said something like… "this is my little crematorium box down here”. She said it in a very warm and affectionate voice.
It still makes me smile and shiver somehow. [...]
Then she opened the box and showed me some small glass tubes. They were filled with something whitish, grayish. It looked somehow like ash… Some even had shades of pink.
She told me that it’s the ash of human lungs…Hey… I was so surprised.
I really didn't expect to encounter lung ash under her table… [...]
Attached to each autopsy report you see counting curves. The measurements from the ashes show that traces of radioactivity from nuclear explosions are detectable in all samples and most lungs seemed to have produced somewhat similar counting curves. [...]
They wanted to prove the high amounts of radioactive materials in human lungs here in Austria – so far away from the test sites."
– Katrin Hornek & Sabina Holzer, Voice Message: Visite Dr. Wallner, Messenger Text (#x), 2024
The white marble sand in space resembles pulverized coral riffs, as well as the shape of some platforms replay the shape of some coral riffs which grew back after the Baker explosion. Storied Matter plays here a great role. The incommensurable power deployed in the destruction of Hiroshima by the first bomb ever dropped (by a bomber airplane called Enola Gay) is glimpsed through the presence of human shadows etched in stones or through the evocation of the hiroshimatites, these countless small teardrop-shaped glass beads to be found on beaches nearby the city, formed in the melting of the city, in the extreme heat of the explosion. Amalgamated concrete, marble, stainless steel, glass and rubber.
"[S]toried matter helps us better understand fragile ecosystems, polluted landscapes, carbon-filled atmosphere, acidifying oceans, changing climate, retreating glaciers, species extinctions and social crises than the scientific data presented in figures and numbers. Simply because through these stories welcome to know 'not only ... the hidden plots and meanings of a reality, but also ... the often unheard voices of this reality', which has today become quite disenchanted with catastrophic human practices.
Thinking about storied matter in a disenchanted world means thinking seriously about how our invasive economic practices produce planetary cycles of pollution, how our political decisions and cultural meanings are enmeshed in their production, and how they all enfold into one indissoluble process."
– Serpil Oppermann, Storied Matter, 2018
Occurring through variable media and formats (visual or sonic, image- or text-based), through different voices (native population, military veterans, scientists, poets, artists), through different embodiments (humans, turtles, lung ashes), and different scales, dissemination, in the exhibition, calls for different modes of attention, cognitive or emotional, concrete or abstract, intuitive or referential. Katrin Hornek makes me feel under my feet, under my skin, down to my bones the situatedness and dispersion, separation and connection, fascination and depression, that characterize the atomic condition.
"Matter fell from grace during the twentieth century. What was once labeled “inanimate” became mortal. Very soon after that, it was murdered, exploded at its core, torn to shreds, blown to smithereens. The smallest of smallest bits, the heart of the atom, was broken apart with a violence that made the earth and the heavens quake. In an instant, in a flash of light brighter than a thousand suns, the distance between heaven and earth was obliterated – not merely imaginatively crossed by newton’s natural theo-philosophy but physically crossed out by a mushroom cloud reaching into the stratosphere. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”"
– Karen Barad, No Small Matter, Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering, in Anna Tsing (et alii), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017. With a quote by J. Robert Oppenheimer in the wake of the first atomic bomb explosion, being itself a translation by the physicist from a line by Bhagavad Gita.
The vertigo of the Western sorcerer's apprentice who brings together forces he barely understands and whose consequences he doesn't measure, the fascination for this terrific deployment of energy which even pierces bodies like X-rays, for the magic of the colorful nuclear mushroom, that – added to the voyeuristic fascination with destruction at all– has underpinned the biased, enchanted narrative of the benefits of radioactivity, the blindness maintained regarding its toxicity and half-life lifespan. The battle of communication around the bomb and the nuclear energy has always aimed at fulfilling cheap desires, maintaining ignorance and orchestrating oblivion. Oblivion of the violent logics underlying it.
At every single site where nuclear bomb testing was performed, it was accompanied by dispossession of land, of stories, of multi-species languages. Natives were sacrificed, contaminated without compensation. Environments and life forms were destroyed and annihilated in the long term. Nothing – or too little was said about it. Reflected in the mirror of the water, the ceiling and floor fall into each other in the space of the artwork, the way radioactive particles precipitate and sediment over the planet, after having been propelled into the stratosphere, and then carried by the winds, contaminating everything. Planetary radioactive fall out and other ecological disasters were not created by the human species, as the word Anthropocene seems to assert, but by the complex entanglement between militarized security, powerful industry, global finance and reckless science in imperialist nations.
"Our modes of noticing […] are themselves monstrous in their connection to Man's conquest. Much of what we know about ecological connection comes from tracking the movement of radiation and other pollutants. Contamination often acts as a "tracer" – away to see relations. We notice connections in part through their ruination."
– Heather Swanson, Anna L Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, Bodies Tumbled into Bodies, Introduction of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017
"It is too hot this summer. As though the sun were too close.
And I, who was always laughing and saying I am a salamander–which expresses no more than my wistful admiration of this animal that lies motionless in the sun, lost in dreams, barely discernible from the surroundings, ready to react and disappear at any moment … I am moving as though I am slowly evaporating. The heat is making me claustrophobic. I am not sweating, I am drying out. I try to spend as much time as possible away from the city, on the water.
I’ll never be able to wear a bikini again without thinking of the South Pacific Bikini Atoll. […|
In fact, it was named after the island. The name of the island comes from the Marshallese, Pikinni (.........) - “Pik” means surface and “Ni” means “coconut,” so, the surface of the coconut. […|French designer Louis Réard named it after the atoll in 1946. 1946. The year of the first atomic bomb test of “Operation Crossroads,” which was carried out on the Bikini Atoll. Réard, on the contrary, was conjuring up sun, sex, and pleasure. […|
All of that and the heat are making me dizzy. I look for somewhere to sit down. To stretch out my tired legs. I close my eyes and listen to the sounds around me. … but what would a postnuclear creature be like, a postnuclear being marked by nuclear weapon science. My bikini is with me in my bag. what a mysterious monstrous sign."
– Katrin Hornek & Sabina Holzer, Dreamscape: Bikini, Messenger Text (#x), 2024
The ungraspable violence, the disintegration of life, and the silencing of critical voices created countless traumas. Cultural and poetic translations, like memorial narratives, scientific observations, late first-hand testimonies, futurist fictions, angry daydreams, created to survive and to weave a collective resilient imaginary, constitute the core of testing grounds. From an eye witness account of Andrei Sakharov, who developed the first megaton-range Soviet hydrogen bomb, to the US veterans of nuclear testing who are allowed to finally speak out, to the scientist-author of the Baker crater’s sonography addressing his grand-son, to the activists of the Los Alamos Research Group – the very site where US worked on the bomb during WWII, to that of the artists invited, involved, who themselves weave their words into other texts, they all work as antidotes against forgetfulness, depression and despair.
"can we forget that flash? / suddenly 30,000 in the streets disappeared / in the crushed depths of darkness / the shrieks of 50,000 died out / when the swirling yellow smoke thinned / buildings split, bridges collapsed / packed trains rested singed / and a shoreless accumulation of rubble and embers – Hiroshima / before long, a line of naked bodies / walking in groups, crying / with skin hanging down like rags / hands on chests / stamping on crumbled brain matter / burnt clothing covering hips / […] / city of 300,000 / can we forget that silence? / in that stillness / the powerful appeal / of the white eye sockets of the wives and children who did not return home / that tore apart our hearts / can it be forgotten?!"
– Tōge Sankichi, August 6, in: Poems of the Atomic Bomb, 1951. Translated by Karen Thornber
"The bomb went off.
It really was the most… I’ll never experience anything like it again. I know that.
It was completely daylight at midnight. Brighter than the brightest day you ever saw.
I cannot begin to describe the light that came into my eye. I was totally blinded. When I came out of the blindness, I saw my hands. And by this time, I actually saw the blood vessels in my bones, in my arm. You could literally just see every bone in there – everything. Even the guy’s bones and back that was in front of you. That’s how bright the light was, to go from through the back of your head, through your eyes, and into your fingers. You’re seeing your bones in your hands. And how did it come through all that to get to your bones, that you could visually see them, like an X-ray?
The light faded and it’s like streaks of lightning and from the ground to the sky about every two feet around you. And then that faded, and it was like giant fireballs in front of your eyes.
When the wave hit me, it knocked my over. It actually flipped me over."
– Jim Dangerfield, Verbatim from a Veteran Testimony, in: Mission Fallout, 1957
"Wear these earrings / to parties / to your classes and meetings / to the grocery store, the corner store / and while riding the bus / Store jewelry, incense, copper coins / and curling letters like this one / in this basket / and when others ask you / where you got this / you tell them / they’re from the Marshall Islands / show them where it is on a map / tell them we are a proud people / toasted dark brown as the carved ribs of a tree stump [...]
tell them about the water / how we have seen it rising / flooding across our cemeteries / gushing over the sea walls / and crashing against our homes / tell them what it’s like / to see the entire ocean__level___with the land / tell them / we are afraid / tell them we don’t know /of the politics /or the science /but tell them we see /what is in our own backyard / tell them that some of us / are old fishermen who believe that God / made us a promise / some of us / are more skeptical of God / but most importantly tell them / we don’t want to leave / we’ve never wanted to leave / and that we / are nothing without our islands."
– Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Tell Them, 2011
Bodies are both receptacles and markers of radiation. If exposed to it, bodies are passive witnesses of the entropy hitting them: the absorption of radioactive nuclides in place of calcium in bones, or the ionization in cells leading to their death or mutation, and ultimately, depending on exposure, acute global irradiation syndrome or, in the longer term, development of cancers, congenital malformations or destruction of the microbiome. Storing and retaining traces, bodies function as markers to measure exposure to radioactivity a posteriori, like the lung ashes from a laboratory in Vienna, or the shells of a turtle. Touched bodies serve for future health monitoring. Differentially marked bodies mark different exposures and hence can testify to the separation between bodies that count and bodies that don't (local population, human and animal). Through the stories they carry and tell, in the exhibition, with or without words, they are also agents of memory, resistance, and, perhaps, some future bifurcation.
"[W]e discover a portal beneath artificial tree lines and undrinkable coconuts—a lagoon, a tranquil respite. Here, we gather resilience from our shared experience before moving onward. Emerging on the other side, a field unfolds, inhabited by atomic soldiers. Faceless, just numbers, we witness the mushroom cloud overhead. Bodies ablaze, protecting each other's eyes, we move—escaping, leaning, resisting. Frozen on the ground, immobilized, we step on one another, pick each other up, a dance against the forces attempting to erase our identities. We keep digging, unearthing stories with unwavering determination.
As we traverse this journey, we metamorphose into radioactive mutants, exploring a melted reactor from within. We grapple with the consequences of matter splitting, its impact on our space-time existence, cells, and the very order of the universe. In our resistance, we persist, remaining, remembering, and healing. We carry the weight of history, vowing not to forget—for the good of mankind, and in the pursuit of an end to all wars."
– Karin Pauer & Chat GBT, Scenario #1, 2024
In the exhibition space, my body encounters other bodies, imagined or real. The shadow bodies of the bomb: dead people, scientists, politicians, soldiers, residents. The turtles’ bodies. The performers’ bodies. Suddenly, I see and feel presence, I hear movements around me. Three performers, under the direction of Karin Pauer, seem to embody different states under the atomic condition, through gestures, movements, rhythms: they become alternately, successively, walking bodies, damaged bodies, mute bodies, mutant bodies, resisting bodies, excavating bodies, bending bodies, dreaming bodies. The thin line between performing and just be is subtly worked out. I feel in their movements the post nuclear condition we share. The bodies around me seem driven by anger and despair, drawn by forces of attraction or repulsion, but also empowered by collective strength and reciprocal care, carried along by shared stories. They sometimes look at me, or is it through me? They sometimes seem to be falling into each other. They bring back ghosts from the past as much as they invent future mutants.
"Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.” It makes it difficult to pose nature as a mere background for the exploits of the human, since “nature” is always as close as one’s own skin. Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the “environment,” which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a “resource” for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings, with their own needs, claims, and actions."
– Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature, 2009
The vertiginous rift wide open on scientific as well as on ethical level by the bomb also made clear the fact that nothing is separated, everything is connected. In the show I am reminded all the times of my tights to the molecules, atoms, and more-than-humans that compose me and surround me. The inaccuracy of an ontological separation between human and non-human comes to the fore: Everything is linked and interdependent – but not within a super-resilient, self-regulating system as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis hoped with their Gaia hypothesis – but rather within a porous, fragile, even precarious system, where each element has a position and a role, and where a rupture can unfold into a disruption.
"I am not just in the thick of it, in the networked and virtualized age of cyberpunk – back in the day, when we read Neuromancer or He, She and It, I did not imagine that it would be so banal –; I am moreover a member of that reprehensible species (humankind) that occupies, befouls, and obliterates everything. But I am also a mother, a cyborg, an art theorist, bacteria, water, a plant, subjectivated in the “belly of the beast”, am a feeling, moving, sensing being, an earthling with and among others. I exist, am open, am – . At issue is the oikos, the household in its both macro- and microscopic senses; at issue, in other words, are connections and interfaces, couplings and decouplings, catenae and effects."
– Yvonne Volkart, Techno-Öko-Feminismus. Unmenschliche Empfindungen in technoplanetarischen Schichten, in: Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), Die schönen Kriegerinnen, 2018. Trad. by the author
The atomic energy is only a part of the harmful relation extractive capitalism imposed on earth and on living. While deconstructing this toxic relation, sometimes resorting to the springs of formal spell and magic, Katrin Hornek does not yield to naive exemption from her own entanglement. The materials, either synthetic or minerals, come from the extractive and chemical industries, mostly from petrochemistry. The artist does not hide the unmistakable participation of the artworld in a planetary capitalist regime of extraction, oppression and competition, with its oiled circuits of work, production, circulation, distribution and predation, which gave birth to the bomb.
Katrin Hornek gathers stories and creates meaning beyond official instrumental narratives or statistical accounts, or ethically and poetically decodes them. testing grounds is a space of material, symbolic and political concentration, stratification and reverberation of effects and affects from the Atomic Age. Her installation becomes the echo chamber for multiple voices, from the past, present and future, distilling a feeling of ontological inseparation and collective responsibility.
"As artists, our work was not only to analyze, but above all to register a shift in social sensibilities. We found that the Anthropocene mode of production is associated with a certain feeling, which remains quite palpable today: an exhilarating but troubling feeling, wildly expansive yet weirdly claustrophobic, threatening too."
– Brian Holmes, Jeremy Bolen, & Brian Kirkbride, Born Secret (Cash for Kryptonite): A field guide to the Anthropocene mode of production, in: The Anthropocene Review, Volume 8 Issue 2, The Mississippi Papers (Part 1), August 2021
"We are not posthuman; we are compost. We are not homo; we are humus. We are terran; we are earthlings; we are many; we are indeterminate. We bleed into each other in chaotic fluid extravagance. We eat our owns snakey tails in sympoietic whorls to generate polymorphic ongoingness; we are enmeshed with the ouroboroi of diverse interlaced netherworlds. We are chthonic, of and for the earth, of and for its unfinished times. We live and die in its ruins. We tunnel in the ruins to germinate in the seams. We can yet be resurgent. There may still be time. Composting is so hot. "
– Donna Haraway, Capitalocene and Chthulucene, in: Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary, 2018
•
testing grounds is an immersive live installation conceived by Katrin Hornek and developed in a collaborative process with artists Karin Pauer, Sabina Holzer and Zosia Holubowska as well as researchers from different fields.
•
Link to the exhibition's website
https://secession.at/en/ausstellung_katrin_hornek_en
•
Link to the catalogue's pdf
https://secession.at/items/uploads/module_pdf/1712839117_SEC-17x24-KatrinHornek-WEB.pdf
•
Link to the artist's website
https://katrinhornek.net/en/
•
Image and photo credits from left to right and from top to bottom
1 & 2 • Exhibition view, Secession Vienna, 2024. Photo: Sophie Pölzl
3 • Performance with Cat Jimenez, Karin Pauer, Mani Obeya, Martina De Dominicis, Secession 2024. Photo: Eva Würdinger
4 • Exhibition view, Secession Vienna, 2024. Photo: Eva Würdinger
