Canticle of the Nuclear Sun: An Exploration of Rituals in Artistic Research to Address a Proposal for the Long-term Burial of Radioactive Waste in Sardinia

This paper discusses the role of rituals in the transmission of transgenerational memory in radioactive heritage practices through the author’s artistic research project ‘Canticle of the Nuclear Sun’. The title references what has been thought to be the most ancient text in the Italian language, a poem from Francis of Assisi dated around 1224—Canticle of the Sun—a hymn to nature and life. A second reference is a collective ritual that took place in the Kontiolahti area, where a Lutheran congregation gathered around a carving sculpture created by Finnish artist Pessi Manner to perform a nature prayer service on the theme of the “Canticle of the Sun” as a protest against uranium prospecting. For his sculptures Manner used, among other symbols, the symbol of the sun (Kainulainen, 2011).

Ritual patterns is a term developed by the author to describe performative and artistic practices that more or less freely refer to the religious practice of rituals. The common use of the term ritual as a repetitive action pattern is considered by the author as a mundane derivation of religious ritualistic practices. Traditional rituals, although different in every culture, hold the capability of generating an idiosyncratic transformation in the collective sense of reality (Geertz, 1973). Ritual patterns in artistic research may thus function as speculative practices to address various implications of nuclear policies in relation to the transmission of memory through deep time.

The paper focuses on artistic research in the territory of Sardinia, the author’s homeland, and the ancient practice of “Canto a Tenore”, an ancient traditional polyphonic singing for four voices. Sardinia hosts 60% of NATO military bases in Italy, a territory also used for testing experimental weapons and rockets and disposing of old weapons and chemicals. Birth malformations and cancer within the population, as well as a large number of animals reported as born with deformities, are linked to these practices, in particular to the emissions of depleted uranium. Currently (2025), there is a discussion on whether 8 sites within the territory of the NATO bases in Sardinia can be used to host a national site for high-level nuclear waste storage.

Sardinia is one of the oldest geological regions of the Mediterranean Sea: ritualistic traditions and folklore are deemed to be rooted in prehistoric times. The paper is developed with the insights of linguist Andrea Deplano, who traced the etymology behind the words used in the "Canto a Tenore” and discovered that sounds that were thought not to have a meaning were instead understandable in the Sumerian-Akkadian language. The unfolding of ritual patterns is thus intended as a way to seek forms of embodied knowledge within the understanding of “Nuclear Natures”; the term is used following Strom (2018), to consider an interaction between a concept of nature as a sheer force and humans’ created nuclear structures and contaminants.