Pazugoo, 2016 - ongoing
Research project with a range of outcomes, focused around burying 3D-printed demons as markers of nuclear toxicity.
Selected exhibitions:
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 2020
Selected writing:
Weir, A. (2022) ‘Case Study: Pazugoo and Nuclear Waste as Alienating Future Relic’, in L. Huybrechts, O. Devisch & V. Tassinari (eds.) Re-framing The Politics of Design. New York: Public Space, pp.188-195., https://politicsofdesign.be/
Ele Carpenter, 2019, diagram
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Background to the Project
Pazugoo is an ongoing research project that has led to a number of works, exhibitions, workshops, presentations and texts.
It was initially imagined in 2016 as a speculative response to the idea of ‘marking’ geological repository sites of radioactive waste to communicate to future generations. Rather than making a monument above ground, it proposed to bury objects underground to become part of the earth over an indefinitely long duration.
Against the sealed imaginary of the repository, Pazugoo focuses on the materiality, history, life and future of the nuclear waste itself. This references the deep history of the earth, colonial extraction, more-than-human planetary processes of toxicity, and billion year futures beyond human-species scale. The project draws on philosopher Reza Negarestani's invocation, in Cyclonopedia (2014), of the Sumero-Asyrrian demon of dust and contagion, Pazuzu, particularly in its method of 'double of flight', connecting local to cosmic scales through a delirious excess of wings.
Through group workshops, Pazuzu morphs into its gooey glitchy reformulation of Pazugoo . Participants work with historical museum artefact scans, reconfiguring them according to a morphology of cosmic double flight, alongside myths of the earth local to the areas where the objects will be buried. Materialised through contemporary technology of deep time particle pestilence, the 3D-printer, this leads to production of multiple plastic figures, and casts in resin and bronze, as demonic objects for burial at specific sites. These buried objects are referenced through an Index figure, which is exhibited and enters into museum collections as an archive.
The project has developed through activities including the Perpetual Uncertainty series of exhibitions curated by Ele Carpenter, site visits and residency work with H.A.D.E.S, the underground laboratory of ONDRAF/NIRAS, the Belgian National Agency of Nuclear Waste Management, and the neighbouring Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Hasselt. Belgium, with curator Ils Huygens. As well as the buried objects and museum index figures, it has taken forms of installations including objects, prototypes, research material, video work and diagrams imagining deep time futures, alongside written work and presentations on ideas related to and emerging from the research. It aims to connect the specific toxic materiality of the earth with its embedding or personification in future myth, a method of geo-fiction.
Current Developments
As Pazugoo has developed, it has moved away from the specific context of site marking into a critical engagement with planetary nuclear toxicity more generally. While waste may be buried and marked as safe in one part of the world, analyses such as that of Gabriel Hecht's Being Nuclear (2012) have shown how, away from the Global North, traces of toxicity remain long after uranium mines have been abandoned and materials exported, highlighting asymmetric power relations inscribed into the materials.
More recent work on the project focuses on burying multiple demon objects, with ritual burial processes, in constellations of sites connected through a broader ecology of nuclear waste (planetary formation of uranium, ore deposits, mining, extraction, production, waste, long-term futures, and so on), focusing on specific localities in their extended ecological relations to other sites, looping the ground through ungrounding eruptions of deep time. It connects scales and sites as an underground diagram. Pazugoo invokes an speculative vantage point on the now, calling back from an unknown future, critically alienating what counts as ‘human’ in the present.
Deep times of past and future are entangled within current politics of extraction, harm and care. The project asks how affective encounters with objects now can unfold present experience into its implications within deep time ecologies, opening towards re-oriented futures to come.
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images: workshops at Umea Bildmuseet, 2016; design for The Nuclear Sourcebook, 2016; installation at Malmo Art Museum, 2018.
