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This chapter by curator Dr Ele Carpenter (UK/Sweden) is written in collaboration with visual artists Lise Autogena (Denmark/UK), Gabriella Hirst (Australia/Germany) Warren Harper (UK/Canada), Alex Ressel and Kerri Meehan (UK/Australia) and the late Nangarridj Jeremiah Garlngarr (Jawoyn Country/Australia) to investigate how socially and culturally embedded art practices can bring new knowledge to the discourses of nuclearity and decolonization. 

The chapter draws on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's ethic of incommensurability as a productive framework for rethinking the role and agency of art in nuclear sites and communities. Carpenter applies Tuck and Yang's argument that decolonisation is not a metaphor, to the context of radioactive contamination, where both are incommensurable. She argues that de-contamination, like de-colonisation, like is not a simple point of closure, but rather a process of response-ability. In this sense the nuclear cannot be metaphorically decolonised to produce a clean future.

The artworks demonstrate that the nuclear has always been a form of colonisation of lands and bodies through uranium mining, weapons testing, and contamination. Drawing on nuclear colonial relationships between Denmark and Greenland (Autogena), Britain and Australia (Hirst & Harper, Ressel & Meehan), the art projects trace changing perspectives on uranium and nuclear materials across continents and hemispheres. Through collaborative and distributed artworks the artists examine different approaches to responsibility for land and country, generations past, present and future. The projects address nuclear geopolitics and deep time storytelling through indepth artistic research with specific communities and contexts. Their works create forms of colonial acknowledgement, moving between territories and cultures, to rethink the language of nuclear modernity.

Curator Ele Carpenter and artists Alex Ressel and Kerri Meehan collaborated with the late Nangarridj Jeremiah Garlngarr to publish one of his paintings of the Bula Djang Coronation Hill/Guratba Earthquake dreaming as the key figure for this chapter. The painting is vital to 60,000 years of Indigenous intergenerational transfer of knowledge about how to behave with care and respect in an area now known to be rich in uranium. 

To try and situate the relationship to country in an older European relationship to land, Carpenter critically reflects on the concepts of the commons and undercommons. She argues that the acknowledgement of nuclear incommensurability helps to open up space for solidarity and allyship, a space which might be described as a nuclear undercommons. This discussion raises many unresolved questions about artistic nuclear decolonial discourse, which continue to be investigated through the field work, artistic and curatorial practices of the Nuclear Culture Research Group.