Roger Peet: Dig Up The Sun
On view: October 6th – October 28th, 2023
Opening Reception: October 6th, 5-8pm
Artist Talk: October 14th, 2pm
Hours: Thursday – Saturday, noon-5pm
The exhibit is centered around a linoleum blockprint map (based on original research) which traces the route of the Congolese uranium used to develop the first atomic weapons through the nascent infrastructure of the US Army’s Manhattan Project. It expands to include contemporary investigations into the legacy of the mine which produced that uranium ore, called Shinkolobwe, in the landscape of both DR Congo and the United States. This includes testimony from medical professionals, historians and botanists in Congo, as well as the story of the contamination at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation 3 hours to the east of Portland, the most highly contaminated site in the western hemisphere. Hanford’s radioactive pollution is largely composed of the waste left behind after processing that Congolese ore, a distinction which it shares with many of the Manhattan Project’s processing sites, as well as the communities in New Mexico, the Marshall Islands, and Japan devastated by both nuclear weapons testing and their use in war. The Shinkolobwe mine’s uranium draws a line through this narrative, but the mineworkers who dug the ore have been left out of history.
Through print, paper-folding, installation, and photography, Dig Up The Sun also investigates a deeply personal history of the artists’ father; a British pilot working as a contractor for the CIA during the US and Belgian project to maintain control over Congo’s resources in the decades after the war. The manufacture of identity, the colonial control of minerals, and the power to destroy the future reveal a mystery at the heart of the story of the bomb: that the world has already ended, but the blast is not yet here.
Roger Peet is an artist and printmaker and writer in Portland. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, a group of North American artists making art for social and environmental movements, and helps to run the Flight 64 nonprofit community print studio on Alberta St. The New Republic recently published his essay about DR Congo’s minerals crisis and the legacy of Shinkolobwe here.
This project was funded in part by a grant from RACC.
