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Erich Berger + Mari Keto, Open Care: Autoradiography - gamma radiation exposure of the brass disk on X-ray sensitive film, 2016, courtesy the artists
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Artwork

Open Care

OPEN CARE is a set of artifacts which propose a social thought experiment: what if nuclear waste were a very personal responsibility and thus part of our everyday life and our cities? It is an imaginary system for distributed nuclear waste storage which implicates us intimately in a much longer swathe of the future than most of us can imagine easily. The waste is encapsulated in steel pellets mounted in a bronze disk. An electroscope, gold leaf, an electrostatic rod, and fur to charge it are provided along with instructions to check the level of radioactivity periodically, from generation to generation, to ascertain whether the waste of which you are custodian has become safe “or if you and your descendants need to continue to care about it.” Rendering the huge timescale of radioactive decay into more meaningful units of lifetimes opens the question of collective care from a fresh perspective.


Close up of installation object consisting of a bronze disk with small drilled holes in an irregular circular pattern mirroring that of the
Erich Berger + Mari Keto, Open Care: Americium 241 Nuclear Waste Container, 2016, courtesy the artists and Studio Deussen

Close up of installation object consisting of two-ring binder and text documents
Erich Berger + Mari Keto, Open Care: Foundation Handbook, 2016, courtesy the artists and Studio Deussen

Installation of instrument-like objects and documents in a museum vitrine
Erich Berger + Mari Keto, Open Care Installation at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2016, courtesy the artists and Luce Photography

Citation

Erich Berger and Mari Keto, OPEN CARE, mixed media, 2016.

Last Updated:

06/10/2021

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