This Place is a Message
by Tamás Cseke
Shortlisted Artist for the Charta Award 2025
My interest in nuclear energy and nuclear waste facilities are based on a study which argues that nuclear waste is the only mark that we leave on this planet, that will survive us and every culture we develop.Radiation stays with us, and it is the most persistent mark of us tempering with our physical world. How can we satisfy 8 billion people and their energy demand? Some say that nuclear energy is the perfect transitional energy, but does it justify the severity of pollution it generates? How does this relate to the marks we found that were left by cultures before us? What they will think of us in thousands and thousands of years? We see in adventure movies, that opening sarcophagi from the past causes some disease to spread, and in final everyone to die. This very thing can happen in the future with our nuclear waste. How do protect future cultures from our poisonous scar that we leave on the planet? Is there any way to mark a place like this? Languages, symbols, even the constellations are as ephemer as us. My approach was to observe and collect. I edited together my images with archival ones from Paks NuclearPower Plant with the aim of raising questions about it. The construction of a nuclear power plant is always apolitical act, an investment for more than one electoral cycle.In my interpretation the idea of the journey in this case is a symbolic one. To understand the journey is to understand the path, and in my case this path is the path towards a very distant self-sustaining future already polluted in the name of sustainability. This path started with the industrial revolution, had a big checkpoint at the invention of the atomic bomb, and now we are wandering in a post-everything world hoping to solve different iterations of the same problem. And the energy crisis is only one.