Concrete Archives is the compilation of Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce’s fieldwork to local and international sites of nuclear colonisation, genocide and memorialisation.
Between 1952 and 1963, the British government exploded twelve full-scale atomic bombs across the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, and Emu Field and Maralinga in the South Australian desert. One of the tests that occurred at Maralinga reached twice the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Yhonnie Scarce has been returning to Woomera and Maralinga for several years in order to conceptualise and produce works that act as a memorial to the unspoken displacement and genocide of Aboriginal people as a result of these tests. In this context, Maralinga is a site for beginning to consider the role of memorialisation and how it might be conceptualised and actualised. Lead by artists, Concrete Archives asks how we address the cultural amnesia that obfuscates, if not renders invisible the Genocide of Aboriginal people in Australia since colonisation.
The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives) is an evolving project documenting the shared experiences of two women: one Aboriginal, the other non-Aboriginal. Pre-pandemic, Radford and Scarce travelled across the world to visit sites imbued with significant histories of devastation, including Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Maralinga, New York, Wounded Knee and former Yugoslavia. Scattered across the globe, these sites are an archive human history and loss in the form of architecture (brutalist buildings, monuments and memorials) and imagery (photographs, diarised accounts). Scattered across the globe, these sites are an archive human history and loss. The artists hoped that visiting these sites would help build an understanding and language for describing the experience of these sites and histories in the context of Australia’s own history of colonialism and in doing so, have engaged, documented and commissioned the work of in excess of 100 other artists, writers and thinkers
Previously compiled in digital, oral and exhibition 'archives' comprising historical and contemporary works making materially present what is lost and remembered, this significant publication documents the exhibitions, digital archives published by Art & Australia and an introduction to the photographic fieldwork by the artists Scarce and Radford. All proceeds will be donated to ICAN.
472 pages, 15.4 x 21.6, 12 books and 6 inserts housed in custom box, Person Books (Melbourne / Naarm).