The Nuclear Culture Deep Geologic Repository Workshop brings together artists and researchers in Nuclear Cultural Heritage to expand the Deep Time discourse of radioactive waste repositories to consider their geopolitics within a contemporary decolonial context.
This unique gathering of researchers will enable new ways of thinking about the role of arts practice-based research in marking radioactive waste sites for future generations. In 2024 the group undertook field-research at Finland’s Onkalo geologic disposal facility for high level radioactive waste currently under construction at Olkiluoto in Eurajoki managed by Posiva. In 2025 they were planning to visit Sweden’s Final Repository for Short-lived radioactive waste at Forsmark, Östhammar, managed by SKB. This has not been possible and instead the group are researching Sweden’s nuclear history through its cultural centres and the landscape around the repository site.
European Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) programs have been supporting cultural work in this field for several years and have established certain cultural and aesthetic tropes which will be explored from a wider critical and decolonial perspective. This workshop brings together experienced researchers in the field of nuclear culture and heritage to undertake primary field research to enable new paradigm shifts in the discourse. The experience of the site visits will be consolidated and evaluated in this paper to develop research frameworks for new conceptual understandings of the repository project.
The Nuclear Culture Research Group was established in 2011 by curator and artist Ele Carpenter, who is now Professor in Interdisciplinary Art & Culture at Umeå School of Architecture, and Director of the UmArts Research Centre at Umeå University. Carpenter curates large scale survey exhibitions of contemporary art investigating nuclear aesthetics and has facilitated artistic field research in Underground Research Labs for radioactive waste in Japan, France, Belgium, Finland and the UK.
The Research Concept is to explore how to bring together nuclear decolonial perspectives on geologic waste and deep time marking systems from Nordic, Eastern European, Canadian, and indigenous Australian perspectives. The workshop will focus on developing new conceptual frameworks that go beyond the site marker, and integrate the repository project into contemporary nuclear cultural heritage and decolonial discourse addressing the following research questions:
- How does artists research into the decolonial contexts of Deep Geologic Repositories contribute to the discourse of nuclear memory and Nuclear Cultural Heritage?
- How are repositories a form of Material Witness to the legacy of 20th C nuclear technoscientific practices?
- How can temporalities beyond human-centred time be articulated through the materiality of DGR information and technology through artistic practice in collaboration with anthropology and geology?
- How can an interdisciplinary arts research analysis investigate DGR’s as a model for rethinking the decolonial geopolitics of the nuclear military industrial complex?
How to cite: Carpenter, E., Berger, E., Rindzeviciute, E., Schuppli, S., Scarce, Y., and Ruhland, G.: Interim Field Report: Nuclear Culture Deep Geologic Repository Workshop, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-105, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-105, 2025.
