Spring 2023

Radioactive Throats

In Collaboration with UN Office of Disarmament Affairs (UNODA)

Mentored by Malkit Shoshan

Graduate School of Design

Harvard University

Can you answer me?
Why don’t I have a dentist?
A doctor for my lungs, my kidney, and my liver?

Can I please find meaning
so that I can find peace of mind? Because I might go insane not knowing. 

A nuclear explosion in your homeland can disfigure the way you write songs. As you sing them, your own voice will estrange you. A shift was observed in the folk musical practices of Marshall Islands, after the United States, from 1946 to 1958, successively carried out nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll. It was one of the most profoundly abrasive experiments on the humankind. The project inhabits the shadows and silences that are insidiously inscribed within societies by such invisible state and colonial machineries. Radioactive throats - An intermedial visual and sonic piece - explores the global nuclear as an aural culture and intends to partake in the cultural and aesthetic responsibility carving legibility of that which cannot be heard. The exhibition unearths the epistemological and existential distortion of the indigenous vocalities of the Marshall Islands and the ways militarization, forced exile and motifs of gendered violence engenders and perpetuates hyperlocal risk-scapes of precarious harmonies.

AI generated hallucinations