Post Atomic: A conversation between Alison Sperling and Anna Volkmar with a visual response by Donald Weber

Abstract

From 2005 until 2007, Canadian photographer Donald Weber spent time around

the Chernobyl region in Ukraine, documenting the area and its inhabitants. The

result of this is the photographic series Post Atomic (2005-2007). On a late

November afternoon, Alison Sperling, a post-doctoral fellow at the ICI (Institute for Cultural Inquiry) in Berlin, and Anna Volkmar, a PhD candidate at Leiden University, engaged in a conversation on these photographs, which functioned as an impulse for a broader reflection on the nuclear era and its conceptual challenges. Faced with a phenomenon that resists comprehension, Sperling and Volkmar deal with ways of challenging popular framings of the nuclear, especially in the so-called ‘exclusion zones’, through different theoretical tools and objects of study. What kind of artistic practices can unshroud the complexity usually associated with the nuclear in popular imaginaries? What potential does the (non-)human body hold to broach the disturbing effects of the nuclear legacy? How can we face and responsibly address the ethical stakes that come with living in and with the nuclear, more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster?