The Viktoria Lake at Barsebäck: A radioactive sludge pond as material witness

An inherent paradox characterizes the material remains of the atomic age. On the one hand, from a human perspective, radioactivity will remain forever and can only – sometimes – be moved and consciously stored and imaginatively contained. On the other hand, radioactive contamination entails substantive materialities to disappear. Nuclear facilities are to be fully dismantled, machinery to be cut into pieces, sorted and melted, skylines drastically changing. What remains will be voids, scars, but also more quiet remnants, transformed and in resonance with what is no longer there.

Taking Susan Schuppli’s work on material witness (2020) as a point of departure, this presentation explores the capacity of “nature” to offer alternative modes of investigating historical events and experiences forming cultural heritage as part of nuclear decommissioning. More specifically, it tries to unveil the potential witnessing at a decommissioning site in southern Sweden, the Barsebäck nuclear power plant, through a study of the material traces of a radioactive sludge pond, called the Viktoria Lake. Tentatively, the presentation will suggest a narrative of human-nonhuman intersections in a theoretical-methodological reflection on the (post-)nuclear condition, challenging and expanding what might be considered heritage, both from a heritage institutional perspective and from an anthropocentric point of view.