Before taking off on our road trip in the fall of 2015, we (Ayo and Felipe) didn’t discuss it much. Only after we met up in Stockholm did we start to plan our route. Sigrid, an artist who offered to let us stay at her house, recommended that we visit Falun, which she said might have some connection to the nuclear waste repository in Oskarshamn, so we added it to our itinerary, making Falun our first stop before continuing on to Oskarshamn, and our scheduled visit to the Grimeton Radio Station.
Falun Mine produced copper for almost a thousand years and the town at one time boasted over one hundred smelting furnaces. It accounted for two-thirds of the world’s copper mine production until the 20th century, when mining gradually ceased and the mine became a tourist attraction. By the time of our visit, there was no mining activity at all, only a deep, abandoned, circular pit over 100 meters in diameter. In retrospect, Sigrid’s instinct
was correct, as Falun Mine was similar to the nuclear waste repository in Oskarshamn, which took more than two decades to build, and, at 500 meters below sea level, resembles an ant’s nest with a total of 60 kilometers of branch- like tunnels. The latticework of chambers has been filled, one by one, back to front, with used nuclear fuel.
Our interest in exploration was, perhaps, rooted in our curiosity about how humans deal with the unknown, be it slowly mining for metals before even knowing how to smelt them, or excavating one cave after another to bury the radioactive waste they don’t know how to deal with. The two actions running through these processes ––chiseling and digging– are simple, repetitive acts that continue to create new spaces, leave traces and records, and excavate and bury things. These man-made caves and pits also become temporal variants, connecting human activity to the continuity of time. In Falun Mine, where yearly excavation estimates were recorded, each disappearing space is a record of the past; at the Oskarshamn repository, each of the rocky vaults designated for storage of spent radioactive waste becomes a marker pointing at the future.
Another similarity between the open “caves” at Falun and Oskarshamn is the slightly outdated sound and light installation that greets visitors who venture into their depths. Blue, red, green, and yellow lights flash intermittently, like in some old-fashioned nightclub set, as if to awaken visitors dallying in the past or future and bring them back to the present.
At the end of our visit to Oskarshamn, we learned that the plant was to serve only as an educational museum and a space for experimentation in the future. The actual first nuclear waste repository in operation is not located here, but underneath the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant. So we decided to spend the last three days of our trip trying our luck in Forsmark, seeing what we could see.
Of course, in a country of strict regulations, our attempted visit made us look more like strange and suspicious spies (although it was difficult to classify our respective Asian and South American heritages into any category) than innocent, merely curious artists. Without an appointment, naturally, we were denied entrance and had to make a U-turn in the heavily guarded area in front of the gate. Even now, when recalling this incident, we can still see the guard’s suspicious eyes staring at us. Felipe suspects that the guard wrote down our license plate number and even insists that our attempted visit was the reason why the Swedish Anti- Terrorist Investigation Department later broke into our car on a street in Stockholm and stole all of our equipment and hard drives.
After leaving Forsmark, we still had two days left in our trip because, as we found out, the sites we had visited were either closed or not yet in operation. We pulled into a rest stop outside the plant and studied our map for quite a while, in search of what had, I think, originally motivated our trip: we wanted to witness a “cave” in operation, one that was either being excavated or filled. We drove aimlessly around the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, hoping for a chance to observe or take photos, but it was entirely surrounded by walls and vegetation that blocked all possible views. At a loss, we finally decided to drive to Gräsö Island near Forsmark and drew an “x” on our map, marking the spot on the island closest –as the crow flies– to Forsmark and, we hoped, with an unobstructed view.
After some effort –the trip required a ride
on a ferry boat– we arrived on the island and drove around it several times. Our goal was simply to find a place with a direct view of the Forsmark plant in operation. We finally found it, along the coast northwest of the plant, and its sweeping view was the closest accessible option
on our map. We found mesmerizing the whole concept of the “first deep repository for nuclear waste in human history,” which we felt was an entirely new way for human beings to leave a nearly permanent mark on the Earth, with an underground structure providing an indelible trace of Man’s existence.
We felt that this site, from which the nuclear power plant can be seen clearly with the naked eye, should be duly marked and so we purchased some materials from the only hardware store on the island. (We bought a brass photo frame as a souvenir, which now stands on Ayo’s bookshelf and contains a postcard signed by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.) We constructed a simple object and decorated it with the Falun red paint we bought in Falun, then dug a meter-deep hole and planted the object’s base in it, implanting it firmly on the beach a few meters from the sea. Standing in front of our installation and looking straight ahead, one has a framed view of both the nuclear power plant and the repository. That night at our campground, relieved, we cooked a dinner of red sausages and meatballs purchased from a supermarket, and celebrated with a drink.
1. The Äspö laboratory repository is located below this vegetation field.
2. Falun Mine.
3. Nuclear waste repository.
4. Excavation Marks.
We’ve never had the chance to go back and check, but our installation may still be there today, unlike our video equipment, hard drives, and records, which all disappeared when our car was broken into in Stockholm. The only thing left of that trip are the few pictures we took on our cell phones.
5. Police report of the theft of hard drives, equipment and the violation of the car.
6-7. Intervention in Gräso (Metal estructure, frame, Falu Red and Forsmark Nuclear Plant view).
8. Pigmento rojo Falu.