Contemporary artist Veit Stratmann discusses his work 'A Hill' and the potential for an artwork to become a 'legal political object'.
Veit Stratmann is a German contemporary artist, based in Paris, who has been responding to issues surrounding nuclear waste disposal. In 2011, the French Agency for the treatment of Nuclear Waste (ANDRA) asked Veit to propose a solution to keep the memory of nuclear waste-sites alive for future generations. Veit accepted this invitation, but approached it with open criticality, founding the project on the understanding that the ideology and logic underlying the nuclear industry is incoherent, containing an inherent violence.
Veit developed a speculative proposal for ritualised action: the gradual creation of a protective ‘hill’ over the top of the nuclear disposal site. He proposed that, over the course of 300 years, the topsoil of the site could be gradually elevated, through the removal of earth from next to the site, creating a kind of adjacent ‘wasteland’. This culminated in A Hill - a 12-minute film, that outlines Veit’s proposal for nuclear waste disposal site and, when exhibited, is accompanied by a text outlining a series of questions relating to nuclear energy production and waste disposal.
ANDRA was keen to keep discussions of the proposal away from the public realm and tried to restrict Veit’s communications relating to his work. Responding to this attempted censorship, Veit had the project analysed by lawyers and, due to artistic rights in France, there was no valid legal basis for such a restriction. ANDRA subsequently cancelled the entire scheme and facilitated what Veit wryly describes as a ‘little PR war’ in the local media. This led to a number of angry responses to Veit’s proposal.
In time, Veit was invited, by a documentary filmmaker, to attend a public consultation with those living in the locale of the site. Veit discusses the initial difficulty in communicating the intent of the piece, but that he was able to explain the work more fully to the community. A lawyer attending the event, who happened to be representing a group of protesters against another storage site, was struck by the gravity and significance of the questions posed in the artwork. The lawyer asked Veit for the questions to use as argumentation in court. It was at this point that Veit felt that he moved from being an 'artist' to being a 'citizen' and that the work itself became a 'legal political object'.
In this discussion we consider the role of the artist as citizen and the political potential of creative practice.
Please click here to listen to the discussion (23 minutes)
For a further conversation about art and deep time with Veit (and ceramicist Aimee Lax) please visit the Wild Mythologies series, part of the Broadcast programme for Prospect Art.
