THE BLUE ZONE
REDISCOVERY OF THE SHOWCASING OF A NUCLEAR HERITAGE, 2016
STÉFANE PERRAUD & ARAM KEBABDIJAN
The Blue Zone takes the audience on a journey of time weighted with history. The project is presented as a prospective study, carried out by an international scientific committee, to showcase a long neglected artistic heritage: nuclear memorial. The Blue Zone displays a genetically modified forest, planted on an old nuclear waste storage site in Bure, France, several years after its opening, by Stéfane Perraud, an early 21st century artist.
400 years later, in 2415, the leaves of this clonal colony of quaking aspen, unique to their kind, take in oxygen by turning blue and covering the floor of the forest in an azure carpet once autumn arrives. However, we do not know the primary purpose of this remarkable site, visited by thousands of tourists daily. Fictional tablets mention an ancient forest, to which a whole series of beliefs are attached; an imposing bibliography, attached to the trunks of the trees, alluding to the forests of the Great War, planted throughout the region of Meuse in order to stabilise the chemical agents that have polluted the soil. These references, accounts, fables, historical facts, like the ruins of an ancient fortification surrounding the area, seem to camouflage the nuclear waste as well as highlighting how impossible it is to forget.
BIO
Stéfane Perraud is an artist with a background in performance and multimedia. Since 2008, he has been exploring the impasses and difficulties of what we call ‘new media’. He performs a constant ‘back and forth’ between plastic and performative art. In 2010, he made nuclear energy and radioactive material one of his main areas of practice in the plastic arts. He has addressed this through several approaches including the fixation of Cherenkov radiation in a fluorescent aquarium, reconfiguration of the table of unstable isotopes, and luminous representations of radionuclides.
In order to better understand the present, he uses a prospective approach to record his work. This project is an archaeology of the future.
For several years, Stéfane has collaborated with writer Aram Kebabdijan. Together they created Isotopia, a semi-deserted polar island they use as a laboratory and as the place where the realisation of the works they imagine is possible.