Energy cultures. Energies, imaginaries, currencies, and nuclear horizons of the planet. A 21st-century meeting of artists, scientists, and philosophers
Saturday September 23, 2023
The conference is jointly drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli, and the artist Agnieszka Kurant
Session I and II, 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 4pm, are open to the public, take place in the Castello di Rivoli theater, and will be live streamed in the official YouTube channel of the Museum
Session III, 5pm to 7pm, is a closed-door brainstorming meeting at newcleo, Turin
The question of energy is among the most vital for the future of humanity and the multispecies flourishing of non-human and human life on earth. Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea presents a multi-disciplinary conference of art, science and philosophy entitled Energy cultures. Energies, imaginaries, currencies, and nuclear horizons of the planet to address the contradictions and unleash the disruptive and transformative properties of the energy flowing through artworks and scientific innovations. In an attempt to explore potential scenarios of energetic interspecies co-evolution, the conference investigates living matter at the scale of its atoms, their entanglement, communication, and interaction, attempting to challenge the static postulates and imagined futures of energy. The conference, which will be held on September 23, will bring artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, and architects together for a morning session open to the public in the Theater of the Museum. In the afternoon, they will continue their discussions in a private brainstorming session and meeting of minds at newcleo, a startup based in Turin that promotes an innovative approach to nuclear energy.
“newcleo supports and is co-hosting this event with Castello di Rivoli,” states Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “as part of their outreach activities on nuclear energy, which is seen as an integral part of our future. We will put the undecided and the enthusiasts together and produce a chemical reaction – unleashing quite a bit of psychic energy in the room.”
Energy has shaped life on earth, civilizations and societies throughout history, from the pre-human photosynthetic conversion of solar power into plant biomass, passing through the human-induced CO2-producing carbon fossil fuel including coal, gas, and oil, to hydroelectricity achieved through damming, up to the “very human” mid-20th century use of atomic energy through nuclear fission (the process by which neutrons released from atoms boil water used to generate electricity in turbines). Energy “makes the world go round.” Indeed, it has been a subject of human investigation in the Global North and the Global South and in the indigenous worlds forever. The Greek term ἐνέργεια (energeia), adopted for the first time by Aristotle, derives from the earlier use of the termἔργον (ergon) meaning “active, working,” preceded by en– which means “at” or “towards”. Already the pre-Socratic Heraclitus used the word Ergon (action or deed) and saw the universe in continuous change, and fire as the primary source of action and creator of all life.
Energy is a universal currency, made of a swirling of animal, vegetal, and physical forces. Nonetheless, the current forms of human energy production and consumption are leading to world destruction. Clean energy is the foundation on which our future should rest, but clean electricity still abundantly depends on storage and lithium-ion batteries, which might soon be complemented by sodium ion batteries. How can we cope with the storage of energy? What about the excess of unexploited energy, which accumulates as heat? How can we transmit it or make it become life for other bodies? In the massive-scale stockpiling of energy, essential for our technological devices, can we turn to plants as ‘hyperaccumulators’ and to practices such as agromining or phytomining to reduce greenhouse gas and water pollution, which are byproducts of mineral extraction? As suggested by philosopher Emanuele Coccia, what seems to happen nowadays is a shift of paradigms from the classic thermodynamic system – where the issue at stake is maintaining an equilibrium – to an alchemical one – where any living and non-living being is potentially able to store, release, and multiply the energy received. The contemporary political economy could be described as total cybernetics, based on perpetual transformations of energy as currency into information and into capital, while social energies, mined like oil and gas with algorithms, become part of the global energy market.
“The current abandonment of fossil fuel energies and their gradual replacement by renewable energies,” says artist Agnieszka Kurant, “interestingly coincides with the dematerialization of money and its partial substitution with digital currencies, the production of which is mostly dependent on energy. Traditional mining of fossil fuels and minerals is currently accompanied by the mining of cryptocurrencies on the blockchain—one of which was notably named ‘gas’. What is essential in the production of a crypto currency – a digital current generated through computers solving mathematical problems – is the energy to power the computer. Human labor is still indispensable here and performed by exploited workers at various mines, extracting the rare earth metals powering computers, but due to its reliance on energy, the production of capital through crypto-currency mining has become a race for the cheapest sources to power server farms. Such energy-intensive extractivist capital production in the Global North has environmental repercussions in the countries of the Global South.”
In the rampant drive to extract the last drop of energy from everything and everyone, new forms of slavery have developed. As the global climate crisis forces us to decarbonize and wean ourselves off fossil-fuels, what are the clean energy solutions to mitigate climate change? We have increased more ecological and sustainable water, wind, and sun-based energy production. Counter-intuitively, recent research points also to new forms of nuclear energy produced using nuclear waste as fuel thus ridding the planet of radioactive waste. Researchers in the field argue that nuclear fission might co-support the future of clean energy systems globally. Yet, even if nuclear energy has been statistically less impactful on the environment than fossil fuels, the fear of nuclear accidents continues to be the main consideration when discussing this matter in science, humanities, and in art. Can this be caused by the association with weaponized nuclear energy through the continuous bomb testing, which devastated both the environment and communities in places where atomic bomb tests have been frequent since the 1950s?
As the physical and psychic memory of radioactive waste is currently counterbalanced by the ecological pressure of a nuclear transition against climate collapse, it is time to reinvent our usage of energy to serve sustainable development. Theorists posit thatbioremediation – a branch of biotechnology that employs the use of living organisms, such as microbes and bacteria, in the removal of contaminants and toxins from soil, water, and other environments – is currently being set up as an ecological and economic alternative to traditional procedures of removal of radioactive waste. It has been discovered that certain bacteria have the ability to interact with and absorb radioactive substances, thereby potentially aiding in the cleanup and remediation of contaminated sites.
“Seventy years of experience in operations of nuclear reactors” states Stefano Buono, founder of newcleo, “have now proven that it is even possible to employ the radioactive nuclear waste already existing from decommissioned nuclear fuel or bombs to produce nuclear energy for hundreds of years without extracting any further minerals such as uranium from the earth and do this at competitive costs. A nuclear reaction provides 1 million times more energy than any chemical reactions, and finding ways of using this energy can provide what is needed for the generations to come without impacting our planet producing carbon dioxide which causes global warming.”
But how to negotiate and transform the longstanding dread of nuclear contamination – vividly feeding into the scenarios of science fiction, nuclear disarmament movements and art movements such as Arte nucleare since the second half of the 20th century – nowadays magnified by the reiteration of war threats? Founded by the Italian artist Enrico Baj together with Sergio Dangelo and Gianni Bertini, in Milan in 1951, the group of Arte nucleare celebrated nuclear energy but also warned of the dangers of the misapplication of nuclear technology for the environment by detonating ‘heavy water’, made from a novel technique of combining enamel paint and distilled water. An indirect continuity runs down to Arte povera in terms of sensibility towards the environmental backlash of positivistic science but also of the flux of energy blasting up from the earth, clearly traceable in Gilberto Zorio’s work, or works by other artists such as Giovanni Anselmo and Mario Merz. Embracing how the subatomic particles of the atom collide, these artists manifested the energy latent in the world incorporating in their research the tension between nature and culture. Their experimentation is the prelude to contemporary artistic practices veering between climate breakdown, more-than-human consciousness, biological and computational energies. The nuclear sublime and nuclear melancholy traverse new works by artists today, from Adrián Villar Rojas to Himali Singh Soin, from Lea Porsager to Sophie Cundale and Renato Leotta.
Museums and art institutions, such as Castello di Rivoli, and artistic practices in general, can contextualize contemporary political debates on climate and power and on a new nuclear transition. The conference Energy cultures. Energies, imaginaries, currencies, and nuclear horizons of the planet prompts a collective reflection on factors that influence energy production, circulation, and consumption, and opportunities for change in order to prepare for a future that has already arrived. What makes these considerations of energy particularly urgent is the context of the global energy crisis, began in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated in Europe by the menace of an energy embargo due to the war in Ukraine. This has led to speculation, shortages, increased prices in oil, gas, and electricity markets and inflation. The energy crisis, combined with the climate crisis, is morphing into an ongoing phase where a lasting transition to non-carbon fossil fuel alternative energy sources is no longer an option. The issue of energy is to be also addressed considering those developing and emerging economies, which currently face a two-fold energy challenge: meeting the needs of billions of people who still lack access to basic, modern energy services while simultaneously participating in a transition to zero-carbon energy systems for the good of the entire planet.
The conveners of the program are Agnieszka Kurant and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
Event organization by Giulia Colletti.
The conference is supported and co-hosted by
With thanks to Stefano Buono for his support of the event
The programs of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea are made possible primarily thanks to the support of
The activities of CRRI – Castello di Rivoli Research Institute are supported by
Participants
Paola Antonelli (Sassari, 1963) is Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design and Founding Director of Research and Development at MoMa New York. Her research focuses on design in all its forms, expanding its reach to include overlooked objects and practices from architecture to video games. Her exhibitions, lectures, and writings contemplate design’s intersection and interaction with other fields such as technology and biology but also popular culture and life—that of individuals, communities, all species, and all planets. Her goal is to promote people’s understanding of design, until its positive influence on the world is universally acknowledged.
Stefano Buono (Avellino, 1966) is a physicist and CERN alumnus. In 2021, Buono co-founded the nuclear technology company newcleo, of which he is currently Managing Director. In 2018, he founded Elysia Capital, a Family Office focused on social impact investments in the field of sustainable innovation, well-being, education, art and culture. Buono is President of Planet Holding LTD, a world leader in social innovation solutions for real estate. He is also President of LIFTT, a private company that focuses on stimulating and supporting technology transfer from research institutes, generating a positive impact through the economic investment made from research and innovation plans.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Ridgewood, 1957) is Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti and Visiting Professor at the University of Basel. She was Artistic Director of the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) (2012); Artistic Director of the 16th Sydney Biennale (2008); Chief Curator at MoMa PS1 Contemporary Art Center (1999-2001), following a period at Villa Medici, where she drafted the exhibition summer program (1998-2000). Among her major publications is the catalog of the Cerruti Collection (Allemandi, 2021) and the monograph Arte povera (Phaidon Press, 1999). She received the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence 2019.
Luciano Cinotti (Cerreto Guidi, 1949) is a nuclear engineer and a leading expert in Fast Reactor technologies. He led the Ansaldo Nucleare activities for the improved European fast reactor and the innovative reactors PIUS and PRISM, while also conceiving ISIS, a fully passive reactor for the combined generation of electricity and heat. He is a Euratom Representative and the Chairman of the Lead Fast Reactors Steering Committee of the Generation-IV International Forum from its inception until 2010. He is also the author of most of the world’s LFR-related patents. He is the Scientific Director of newcleo.
Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He was Visiting Professor at The University of Buenos Aires; Columbia University; Harvard; among others. He is the author of Filosofia della casa. Lo spazio domestico e la felicità (Einaudi, 2021), Métamorphoses (Rivages, 2020), The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Politi Press, 2018), Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image (Fordham University Press, 2016); and co-author of Modern Alchemy with Viviane (JBE Books, 2022). He co-directed and co-produced the animation videos Quercus with Formafantasma (2019), Heaven in Matter with Faye Formisano (2021), Portal of Mysteries with Dotdotdot (2022); wrote plays with Frédérique Aït Touati and Duncan Evenou (2022 and 2023); co-produced La Chambre des mémoires à-veniré (2023); contributed to Nous les Arbres (2019) at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; edited the catalogs of Triennale di Milano (2023). He is writing a four-handed work on fashion and philosophy with Alessandro Michele.
Beatriz Colomina (Madrid, 1952) is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. Her books include X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), Domesticity at War (The MIT Press, 2007), and Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Media (The MIT Press, 1996). In Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), Colomina and Mark Wigley explore ways in which humans have been radically redesigned by technologies. In this framework, nuclear waste and distribution of nuclear energy are addressed in relationship with humans’ counterintuitive attitude of extinguishing themselves. In the wake of this, a sense of urgency came over the design community and they researched the notion of survival through counter-design in the post-war era.
Kate Crawford (Sydney, 1976) is a scholar focusing on the social implications of AI. Her work focuses on large-scale data systems and machine learning in the wider contexts of history and environment. She is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, Research Professor of Communication and STS at USC Annenberg, and Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her latest book is Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) looks at AI with a humanist’s eye and an artist’s sense of what really matters. In this book, Crawford recalls AI is not all about big data and machine learning, but rather the natural world.
Sophie Cundale (London, 1987) is an artist and filmmaker currently working on Half Life, a novella about a woman, who falls in love with nuclear waste. The intertwining of nuclear matter and sensual appetites links to matters such as self-poisoning, eating disorders, and addiction to toxic substances but also to an attractiveness towards current nuclear neglect. Her first major solo show took place at South London Gallery and Bonington Gallery (2020) Her recent and previous works have been presented at Plaza Plaza, London; Kapp Kapp Gallery, Philadelphia; Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts, AMINI festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and commissioned by Serpentine Galleries.
Agnieszka Kurant (Łódź, 1978) is an artist investigating collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor, and the exploitations within surveillance capitalism. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at Hannover Kunstverein (2023); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2021-22); SculptureCenter (2013). Her site-specific installations have been commissioned by MIT List Visual Arts Center (2022), Guggenheim Museum (2015). She presented an immersive installation with Aleksandra Wasikowska for the Polish Pavilion of the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010). Her works have been featured in collective exhibitions MoMA; Centre Pompidou; Palais de Tokyo; Guggenheim Bilbao; CAPC Bordeaux; Kunsthalle Wien; Witte de With; Whitechapel Art Gallery; The Kitchen; Triennale di Milano, among others.
The research of Renato Leotta (Siracusa-Turin, 1982) spans from photography, to video and archival materials, investigating the relationship between sea, sky, and land in an attempt to create a dialogue between the real and the ideal. Leotta won the Italian Council Edition X with CONCERTINO per il mare (2023), presented at Castello di Rivoli after his solo exhibition Sole (2020). He participated in the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2023) and was Italian Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2019). He recently presented the solo exhibition Sensibilità at Le Quai – Società delle Api, Monaco (2023). His works have been presented in group exhibitions and biennials including Manifesta12; Gropius Bau Berlin; MAC São Paulo; Palazzo Fortuny Venice. He is co-founder of CRIPTA747 in Turin and Istituto Sicilia.
Sam Lewitt (Los Angeles, 1981) investigates systems of meaning—archives, mediums of communication, and technologies —as they are manifested materially, framed by institutions, and interpreted by subjects. Lewitt excavates industrial, commercial, and educational structures to uncover the conditions of their production and their relationship to the context in which they emerged. Works such as CURE (the Work), z33 House of Contemporary Art (2021); More Heat than Light, Kunsthalle Basel and CCA Wattis (2016); and Stranded Assets, the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); expand his inquiry into the metabolism of production and infrastructure. The latter emerges from a set of lamps found in the stairwell of the recently decommissioned Giuseppe Volpi thermoelectric power plant in Venice’s industrial port of Marghera.
Michael Marder (Moscow, 1980) is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology. Marder has taught at several universities in the United States and Canada, including Georgetown University, George Washington University, Duquesne University, University of Toronto and University of Saskatchewan. His latest books include The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature (MIT Press, 2023) and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (Columbia University Press, 2023). Marder is currently working on his forthcoming publication Metamorphoses Reimagined (Columbia University Press, forthcoming in 2024).
Lea Porsager (Frederikssund, 1981) is an artist who plays with quantum physics, tantric practices, and feminist theory. She interweaves fabulation and materialization within a variety of mediums, including film, sculpture, and text. She was awarded the Mads Øvlisen Postdoc Fellowship (2023). Porsager’s research involves a collaboration with Arts at CERN, for which she received an Honorary Mention for the Collide International Award (2018). Her earthwork and memorial Gravitational Ripples (2018) was inaugurated in Stockholm, Sweden, commemorating the Swedish lives lost in the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2021); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2020-21). She participated in dOCUMENTA (13) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Porsager is currently engaged in public art commissions across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
Federico Ronchetti (Tivoli, 1966) is a nuclear physicist at CERN specialized in the development, production, and operation of detectors for large HEP experiments. He has extensive experience with data acquisition systems, hardware and software trigger systems, and programming for scientific computing. He coordinated the data taking operations of the ALICE project at CERN in critical moments, i.e., after the main upgrades of the detectors and the LHC accelerator. He is currently the technical coordinator at CERN of a parallel computing farm made up of 2800 GPU units used for the compression and synchronous processing of the data recorded by the ALICE detector. This is combined with his commitment to divulgation of science to the general public.
Himali Singh Soin (New Delhi, 1987) is an artist and writer creating metaphors from the natural environment and constructing speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life. She explores the myriad technologies of knowing, from scientific to alchemical. Her inspirations include the ancient Stoics and contemporary literature, travel diaries and ancient diagrams. She works across film, spoken word, performance, epistolary poetry, animation, music, ceramic and textile, which allows her to interweave complex concepts and narratives together. Soin has performed and exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago; Serpentine Galleries; Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka; Somerset House; HKW. She won the India Foundation for the Arts Award and the Frieze Artist Award.
Bruce Sterling (Brownsville, 1954) is a science fiction writer, net critic, and cyberspace theorist who emerged as a proponent of the subgenre known as steampunk. Along with William Gibson, another one of the major figures of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling co-authored the novel The Difference Engine (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1990), forming an alternate—or speculative— history set in 1855 London, which is anachronistically advanced. Signing with his pseudonym, in 2015 he published an anthology of stories titled Utopia pirata – i racconti di Bruno Argento (Mondadori, 2015) taking place in Turin, where the hackers of parallel city converge or in Fiume, where hackers attempt the conquest of the world in a tumultuous advance of countercultures.
Ash Thorp (Oceanside, 1983) is a digital artist, creative director, and concept illustrator. He collaborates with the film industry, experimenting with 3D modeling, VFX, motion graphics and contributing to movies such as Prometheus (2012); The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014); The Batman (2022); among others. He is also known for creating his own digital artworks, unique 1/1 NFT short videos (usually circa 24’’ long) like Degradation (2021); the series Evident Mirror (2021); short films, such as Evinetta (2020); the limited-run online multi-part short film Chimera (2023), and the new abstract short film Diamond Eye (2023); among others. In his most recent NFT series, Nascent (2023), he questions the human condition in an era characterized by a rampant dependence on technology. Chimera unfolds at the intersection between disturbing accidents and uncanny encounters with aliens. Bending the time-space dimension, Thorp plays with the allure of post-apocalyptic scenarios, inviting the audience to engage with their inner fears and future imaginaries.
Ersilia Vaudo (Gaeta, 1963) has a degree in Astrophysics and has been working at the European Space Agency since 1991. During her career, she held various roles in the field of strategy, and worked for several years at the ESA office in Washington DC, where she was in charge of relations with NASA. She was the Curator of the XXII International Exhibition of the Milan Triennale on the theme Unknown Unknowns. An introduction to mysteries (2022). Ersilia Vaudo is President and co-founder of the association Il Cielo itinerante to promote STEM in areas where educational inclusion is lacking. She has recently published Mirabilis. Cinque intuizioni (più altre in arrivo) che hanno rivoluzionato la nostra idea di Universo (Einaudi, 2023).
Adrián Villar Rojas (Rosario, 1980) conceives long term projects, collectively and collaboratively produced that take the shape of large-scale and site-specific environments. Within his research and worldbuilding, which mixes sculpture, drawing, video, literature and performative traces, Villar Rojas brings together the human and more-than-human realms while investigating the fragile and temporary nature of human civilization. His recent exhibitions include The End of Imagination, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2022); El fin de la imaginación, The Bass, Miami (2022); Poems for Earthlings, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2019); The Theater of Disappearance, The Geffen Contemporary at Moca, Los Angeles (2017); NEON at Athens National Observatory, Greece (2017); and have been presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017); among other institutions.
Mark Wigley (Palmerston North, 1959) is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. His books include Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions (Sternberg Press, 2021), Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (Lars Müller Publishers, 2018), and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015). In their landmark book Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), Wigley and Beatriz Colomina explored the way that the human species has always been continuously and radically redesigned by its technologies. In this frame, the question of nuclear waste and the distribution of nuclear energy is addressed in relationship with the human species counterintuitive attitude of extinguishing itself – we essentially designed our own exit. In the wake of this, a sense of urgency came over the design community, and they researched the notion of survival through new kinds of design and counter-design in the post-war years.
Gilberto Zorio (Andorno Micca, 1944) is one of the artists associated with the movement formed in the mid-sixties in Italy, Arte povera. Energy is constantly running through Zorio’s entire research and makes the matter of the works perpetually changeable. From 1967 to today, Zorio has presented in solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum (1976); Stedelijk Museum (1979); Venice Biennale (1978, 1980, 1986, 1995, 1997); Kunstverein (1985); Center d’Art Contemporain of Geneva and Centre Georges Pompidou (1986); Tel Aviv Museum and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (1987); Museu Serralves (1990); Documenta and Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (1992); Dia: Center for the Arts (2001); Milton Keynes Gallery (2008); MAMbo (2009); MACRO (2010); Castello di Rivoli (2017); among other institutions.