Emerging from the Dengie Peninsula, the Blackwater Estuary in Essex crystalises complex issues around history, heritage, ecology and the geo-politics of energy production. In 2002 Bradwell A was the first UK Magnox nuclear power station to enter the ‘care and maintenance’ phase of the decommissioning process. Consultation and planning are underway for a new nuclear programme, Bradwell B, on the land adjacent to the decommissioned Bradwell A. As an estuarine landscape, the Blackwater's interrelationships are planetary. Tides ebb and flow; each winter, birds such as dark-bellied brent geese migrate around 2,500 miles from Siberia to the sucking mud of Essex shores. The Chapel of St. Peter-on-the-Wall sits atop the remains of a half-submerged Roman fort; in nearby Maldon, the well-known ‘Maldon Salt’ is panned and processed. The Estuary’s involvement in the nuclear military-industrial complex rubs against the sustainable practices of the Othona community.

Having lived in Essex and worked extensively with others to produce place-specific work, my project will develop ways to engage the Estuary’s global entanglements; such discursive and embedded strategies have potential to create space for discussion and action on land use and energy production, beyond state/corporate interests. This research project takes the proposition of an ‘archaeology of the present’ from contemporary archaeology as a means to interrogate the co-production of knowledge and material culture in the field of contemporary art.

Leaky Transmissions is a new body of art and research undertaken in the first 18 months of my PhD. This practice related enquiry began by thinking with ‘radio’ as a means of communication, collision and interference. While the radio spectrum is increasingly politicised, codified and privatised, many types of human transmission commingle on the Estuary: cellular networks with wireless connections; electrical substations with Bluetooth signal; slow-scan television with ham radio transmissions. Meanwhile, non-human forces persist, invisible and unrelenting: from the Estuary's conductive geology, to background radiation, and the Earth's vast  electromagnetic fields. Using ‘radio’ as a generative tool, I continue to explore and unpick the uneven, contradictory and often violent relations: from industrial uranium mines to ancient saints and fluted oyster colonies, to cash crops and the irradiated graphite cores, enveloped deep within the body of the decommissioned power station.

Commissions and residencies include: Receiver, Focal Point Gallery; Rings on Water, FPG Sounds commission; Art and Archaeology residency at West Dean College of Art and Conservation; Critical Disturbance at Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: Listening to Non-Human Life, Theatrum Mundi; SHERDS, Nottingham Contemporary; Zu Gast bei den KunstVereinenRuhr, Urbane Kunst Ruhr; Material Culture Unearthed, In-situ Brierfield; Radiophrenia, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow.  

Supervisors

Primary supervisor: Susan Collins
Secondary supervisors: Rodney Harrison (Institute of Archaeology), Larne Abse Gogarty, Onya McCausland

Websites

Nastassja coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network with Ellen Pavey and Dr Beverley Butler.

Temporal School Of Experimental Geography

Personal website: www.nastassja-simensky.com