STALMY NOW! is an artist collective made up of Susan Turcot (visual artist), Angelika Levi (film maker) and Miya Yoshida (writer and curator). The group established in 2017 on the occasion of the annual exhibition project, Sharing as Caring that started after the Fukushima catastrophe. The collective aims at exploring contemporary modes of being affected by economies, politics, technology and emotions and search for ways of “being-in-common” (Jean- Luc Nancy). Our research practices focus on the places connected to the sites of nuclear power stations both historically and at present. By utilising the full potentials of visuals, acoustics and five languages, we work on alternative ways of making knowledge. With three different mediums – drawings, photo/video and text –, we observe the current situations of the areas and speak to the local inhabitants around nuclear power plants in Japan, England, Germany and Spain and the system of traveling and storage of nuclear waste. We are organising film screenings and workshops with the Sharing and Caring project. We are planning a film and a game about the question of measurement of time and nuclear waste. One of recent our projects is: “Open Letter to Those Who Will Live in A Hundred Years“.

Sharing as Caring for A Century: Open Letter to Those Who Will Live in A Hundred Years

After six years living with the aftermaths of the Fukushima catastrophe, many problems are still far from being resolved. The pollution by radiation remains, the dissemination of radioactive particles keeps going on, and no place to store the increasing nuclear waste. Rather than showing viable solutions, the hasty reconstruction of destroyed houses, streets and towns evokes ever new sets of problems. The current situation in Japan and its neighbouring countries indicates the necessity of a long-term perspective and never ceases to demand from us new ways of confronting the incident on a fundamental level. When we think about recent economic and political crises as well as natural disasters, it becomes clear that the catastrophe in/around Fukushima was not an exception. Even far away from Japan, every segment of our lives has become inseparable from intricate structures of energy, transport, network communications, etc.

Here, the name “Fukushima” has served in recent years as a sort of cipher to rethink relationships between humans, nature, and technology within the complex structures of contemporary societies. This makes us look for different ways of imagining and acting on the future outside of the global economies, the goals of measured outcomes by institutions, and the confines of only our own lifespan. These structures may or may not remain, while the decisions of our contemporary mode of living will certainly be passed on to coming generations.

We are turning towards a century perspective and invite people from different parts of the world – artists, poets, writers, musician, scientists, politician, etc. – to write an “Open Letter to Those Who Will Live in a Hundred Years.” We propose to write the personal letter, as it distinguishes itself from other forms of authored texts to personally empower the reader to become an imaginary protagonist who can act. It is certain that in a hundred years… none of us will be alive – you, me, family and friends, etc. However, our open letter project can encourage a more imaginative and caring perspective.

The letter will be enlarged, formatted and printed as poster in order to disseminate widely in public spaces. The distribution will start in the city of Berlin and Heidelberg, but can be expanded to other places in the future, where, for example, the respective author is based. The translation of the letters will be available on the website of Sharing as Caring Project linked by the QR code on the poster.

PU-244* Clear Landscapes (*Halftime 81 million years)
A Film Installation by STALMY NOW!.

Summary

The project PU-244 * CLEAR LANDSCAPES examines cinematic images, drawings, language and spaces with nuclear presence in surrounding landscapes. It presents the temporal dimensions of atomic half-life, its measurements, and its long-lasting effects on man and landscape in a narrative context with one such as Joseph Masco: “a thousand years of colonization of the future”.

The film also examines the relationship between nuclear energy, territory and nationalism and the exploitation of colonial geographies and processes of expropriations.

The visual approach of the film is essayistic, poetic and experimental. It is a kind of “open letter” from the future that dissolves space-time construction in its linearity. Perhaps the imagination of a “different being” is a loophole to the future, for example a 1000-year-old tree, a 1-day insect? We approach the subject with various techniques and the perspective of post humanist cybernetics; visualize the perception of insects and to experiment with the gaps between the visions of humans, plants and animals.

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STALMY NOW! / CV & Portfolio [EN]