ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews interventions by artists providing means to visualize invisible radioactive materials and even radioactivity itself, using radioactive waste materials. This makes it difficult to distinguish a category of “toxic waste” as what was an industrial byproduct becomes an aesthetic object. The projects reviewed include some contained in the space of galleries, but many take a more expansive landscape scale. They include responses to art competitions to create permanent markers for nuclear waste sites, and projects inspired by government planning exercises to create markers preventing exposure to radioactive wastes. Adopting landscape scale, these projects for markers intersect with the work of Land artists, some of whom advocated development of installations as part of reclamation of places seen as industrial wastelands. The interplay between government designs that insist that human responses will be predictable in the future and the understanding by artists of the role of change poses a challenge to concepts of heritage, where heritage embodies unchanging (positive) value. Indigenous activists, artists, and some government planners argue that maintaining knowledge of toxic waste sites requires acknowledging change as universal, identifying the only way to ensure commemoration of toxic places will be through living transmission of tradition.
