Speculative Demonology as Deep Geological Repository Marking Strategy, 2016
Workshop, Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden, 8th-10th November 2016
This was the first stage of the Pazugoo research project, developing work in progress, which was shown at Perpetual Uncertainty, Bildmuseet, Umea.
In the workshop, with Umea Bildmuseet and the Sliperiet FabLab, scanned museum artefacts from around the world are collected, combined and recomposed according to the demonic morphology of Pazuzu – protective Babylonian-Assyrian demon of dust and contagion.
The resulting figures, renamed 'Pazugoo' following the recombinatory aesthetics of the workshop, are proposed to be distributed and buried as 'markers' at specific sites of nuclear waste storage, part of ongoing discussions around critical responses to waste.
Pazuzu, a figure with an excess of wings, as instigator of ‘double flight’ “from Earth to without and from without to the Earth” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia 2008, p.114), is invoked as a conceptual navigation device between the now of the workshop and the beyond-planetary currents of deep time, inhabiting local sites to enact a flight toward universal horizons.
Undoing the fiction of containment of the deep geological repository through focus on mutation, contagion and dynamic pestilence, and using its non-bio-degradability as strategy, Pazugoos may be found as oily Nylon relics by future scavengers, or outlasting such endevaours, drift into oceans becoming molecular or radioglomerate, ingested by marine organisms, entering into unknown bio-Nylon assemblages.
Workshop participants are figured, from the perspective of deep time, as binders for this operation, lured to coalesce granular polymers as an excess of wings for this drift.
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Extract of paper by Anna Volkmar, 'How to deal responsibly with radioactive waste? A discussion paper on one artistic experiment muddling through a wicked question', given at (In)Human Time: Artistic responses to Radioactivity, Amsterdam, May 2018
'Weir’s experimental practice...addresses a present and not a future audience. By engaging the workshop participants in a collaborative effort to design a repository marker of their own, they become implicated in the problem of marking nuclear waste. Given the semiotic and material instability of the markers they design, they enter what can best be described as a relation of complicity that connects individual action to possible future encounters between the markers they dispose and the future organisms they will never meet in person. Importantly, this complicity is enacted not only on a discursive, but also on a material level. The workshop participants, as Weir puts it, become “operational binders” for the nylon particles that coalesce into Pazuzu figurines. This is a significant redefinition of the role that the public assumes in the process of developing feasible marking strategies. While traditional marker designs envision members of the public as bystanders (as I have shown in the case of Spike Field), Pazugoo redefines them as accomplices. A key moment in this linking is the disposal of the figurines which takes the form of a collective performance, linking determinate action to its indeterminate outcome.'
