What is Ness Displaced about?
Ness follows five ‘forms’ of nature as they make their way to ‘the Green Chapel’ (aka lab 1) on Orford Ness, where throughout the Cold War, scientists stress-tested the casings for nuclear bombs.
Meanwhile, the British conducted real nuclear detonations on the Montebello Islands, Australia – as far away from Britain as the British could imagine.
For the history of nuclear testing, just like the history of the abuse of nature, is inextricably entwined with a colonial mindset that sees some parts of the world as empty. In fact it is those very nuclear tests that have emptied and disfigured parts of the world formerly full of life.
Ness offers an alternative outcome: one in which natural forces rise up at a moment of danger to divert the scientists from their act of annihilation.
To acknowledge the relationship between Orford Ness & the sites of nuclear testing around the world, Ness Displaced continuously counts down to the next sunrise or sunset on one of those islands or deserts where nuclear tests have been conducted: and to which we are irrevocably connected via the traces in each of us (the ‘bomb spike’) of the radioactive fallout that dispersed throughout the earth’s atmosphere.