Pablo de Soto
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Exchange Residency Program
(International creators from abroad)
update: 2019.11.21
Pablo de Soto
| Participating Project | Exchange Residency Program (Creators from abroad) |
|---|---|
| Activity Based | Spain / Brazil |
| Period | 2011.11 - 2012.2 |
Purpose of the residency
My purpose is to establish physical and psychological contact with the human and geographical reality of Japan in these difficult days following the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi. My personal interest in nuclear energy begins after Chernobyl and the difficulty as a child to understand radioactivity. It is intensified after the discovery of two abandonned nuclear power plants in Spain due to the moratorium of the 80s. My Architecture Diploma Thesis was the set up of a temporary media lab outside the dismantled Valdecaballeros plant 240kms away from Madrid. I am interested in how the idea of globality built before the Internet: national borders do not exist for radioactivity. I understand nuclear power plants as the most defining architectural typology of the contemporary: the dream of controlling the atom by the human and the evidence of environmental nightmares never imagined before.
Plan during the residency
I would present a cultural research on emerging cultural practices and experimental art that imagined other uses for nuclear power plants. It includes the comic The Sarcophagus by Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin's which proposes to convert the Chernobyl plant in a museum of the future; the musician Fermin Muguraza who proposed to convert the never opened nuclear power plant of Lemoniz into a museum of the Basque culture, or russian techno music collective Kazantip which organized raves inside an abandonned nuclear reactor in Crimea (Ukraine). I will conduct a field research on the issue of Fukushima-Daiichi accident and how it is social and governnace laboratory on the future. I will encounter environmentalists, writers, artists, and my own physicologic landscapes following J. G. Ballard literature. This research will materialized in texts, videos and maps, and diary in spanish languague entitled "Cartas desde Fukushima".
