On Demons, Clay and Greek Mythology: A Visit to Nuclear Belgium
Article published by Anna Volkmar (PhD Researcher, Leiden University), November 16, 2017.
Exhibition view of Cécile Massart’s Colours of Danger for Belgian High-Level Radioactive Waste from the exhibition “Perpetual Uncertainty” at the Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt. Photo by the author.
On October 27, I went underground. Together with thirteen volunteers I descended into the bowels of HADES, the Belgian HADES to be precise. We encountered no lost souls, but a heap of apparently very interesting clay instead. Belgium puts good money into researching this clay, not for spiritual reasons, but because it may offer just the right conditions for a deep geological repository to dispose of Belgium’s high-level radioactive waste. HADES is an underground research laboratory close to the sleepy town of Mol that was built in 1982 to study the feasibility of geological disposal. It was the first of its kind and to my knowledge the only one in the world that fosters a cooperation between the sciences and the humanities in a research programme on nuclear waste disposal. This made me curious and I was lucky enough to find the support of the Environmental Humanities Center to organize a day excursion to the site as part of the Nuclear Waste Weeks that I organised together with my colleague from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou.
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Belgian artist Cécile Massart, for instance, created several circles from brightly coloured loose pigment on the exhibition floor and put a wooden trestle over each, so no one would walk on them. As the title of her work Colours of Danger for Belgian High-Level Radioactive Waste gives away, the circles allude to the logic of repository markers to keep people away by signifying danger. By the time I visited the exhibition, a bit more than a month after it was opened, the floor is covered in colourful footprints – a vivid enactment of the doubtful success of this marking strategy.