Leftover Feast

Valéria Kršiaková
(Theory and History of Art, UMPRUM)

Darja Lukjanenko
(Photography, UMPRUM)

Mike Ma
(Photography, FAMU)

Mikuláš Procházka
(Product Design, UMPRUM)

The project explores the material and cultural entanglements between two seemingly discrete energy systems: nuclear power and food production. In Leftover Feast, the final stage of resource processing for thermal control and nourishment, i.e. the disposal of leftovers, is taken as a starting point for a conversation about current standards and future repercussions of interdependent practices sustaining key metabolic processes in human societies.

The nuclear power plants inputting the energy grid are in fact a military by-product turned over for civilian space. Current events and decisions for the near future (with a typical magnitude of consideration of approximately 50 years) have resulted in the tendering of new power plants that will add to the current stockpile of remaining fuel sources with high levels of radiation culturally and clinically labeled as nuclear waste. At this point, a community of experts finds themselves agreeable that the general protocol is to contain-embed-and-forget with hopeful intent that the threatening remnants stay isolated (with a duration magnitude of 100 000 years) from geographies of human-dependent-earth resources, and populated zones of human cultures. Since early cases of nuclear events and colonization by Americans and Soviets, the processes of these industries have been rendered with high fog and low-visibility due to cultural continuation of containment and partial truths about the leftovers through information and state/industry scripted discourse.

Leftover Feast is an attempt to shake up this discursive inertia and redraw the vantage points that define the entrenched lines of reasoning surrounding nuclear leftovers and their long-term management. It also takes an only mildly speculative position that, based upon current trends of consumption and human growth, future energy production in wattage and calories will be explicitly synergized. Through a happening in the form of a dinner event, key topics were paired with a five-course meal crafted with ingredients harvested from simulations of synergized energy production. Encouraged and provoked by the specific make up of the courses, invited guests with backgrounds in nuclear engineering, ecological activism, journalism, art and design discussed the intertwined conceptual and material aspects of energy production as embodied in the notions of Waste, Commodity, Containment, Embedding, Food Modification and Modesty.