Ghosts of the Manhattan Project

After living for 20 years as a non-scientist in the science communities that were created to build the atomic bomb, it has become too familiar. Coming from Germany with a very different perspective on war, the propaganda, the selective memory and atomic nostalgia had fascinated me since we arrived in Los Alamos. In Oak Ridge, historic images by Ed Westcott, the official government photographer of the Manhattan Project, are omnipresent. Restorative nostalgia of heroes, victory and “Girls of the Atomic City” prevail.

Portal 4, the only standing structure of K-25, a uranium enrichment facility, became my portal into the past. I dug into archives and combined historical images with my explorations, using textures to hint at the uncanny decay of place and memory. The created palimpsests remember the opportunities and promises, the unsolved problems, the victims and the nightmares of the atomic age that make me uneasy about the "nuclear renaissance."