For three days, the Nuclear Natures Conference explored themes like radioactivity, speculative imaginations, science and laboratories, restoration and rewilding, and the designing and politicization of landscapes. Three distinguished keynote speakers, social anthropologist Petra Tjitske Kalshoven from Manchester University, historian of technology David E Nye from University of Southern Denmark and curator and UmArts director Ele Carpenter from Umeå University, developed new lines of thought on analogies between modelling and natural habitats in post-nuclear landscapes, on nuclear narration revolving around the object of a watch originally belonging to a young girl in Hiroshima, and on what is out of scope in nuclear visual engagements, pointing to persisting mechanisms of colonial-related invisibilities.

The conference took place at the welcoming Museum of Work in central Norrköping, Sweden. One evening, the conference participants relocated to the movie theatre CNEMA to enjoy a Nuclear Natures movie night with the screening of four short movies (Ness, Aware, Strahlend grüne Wiese, and Decommissioning a Dream), the latter being screened as of world premiere, and with one of the film makers present to introduce the film. Further emphasizing the ambition to engage with other forms of expression, the conference also hosted an artistic intervention entitled Gentle Reminders by the Pebble in My Shoe Research Collective (more here), as well as a lively and fun show-and-tell session where participants shared a nuclear object/photo they brought with them.

Thanks to all the participants, the conference days offered an intriguing travel to geographies like Australia, India, French Polynesia, the US, and certainly Europe, across multiple temporalities, into stories of the past and uncertain futures, encountering lots of sheep and fish, soil and rock, trees and bacteria, wolf and rabbits as well as vulnerable human bodies exposed, among other things, to tasty Soviet sausages. The Nuclear Natures project team will keep a big box of great memories from this conference and hope it will radiate into future research ideas and collaborations.

Image credits: Martin Edström, Carlos Gonzalvo, Thomas Keating, and Sergiu Novac.