Talk abstract and bio:

Agnès Villette

Walking La Hague’s Nuclear Peninsula: Cold War Legacies and the Material Witness of Rivers and Moss

 At the tip of the Norman peninsula, the nuclear cluster of La Hague forms one of the most significant concentrations of nuclear installations in Europe — hosting, notably, the last operational nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. As the inner perimeters of these sites remain inaccessible and official archives are often restricted or doctored, this research project turns instead to the landscape itself. By tracing material and radioactive residues that lace the peninsula, the project attends to rivers and riverine ecosystems as sites of memory and witness. Two rivers, in particular, take centre stage: for decades they have accumulated contamination from leaks and accidental releases, bearing the slow material testimony of the Cold War’s nuclear legacies. The “slow accident” is reframed through attention to the liquid landscape of this nuclear territory and to the capacity of rivers to deterritorialise contamination beyond security perimeters, thereby bearingwitness to persistent radioactive presence. The peninsula thus becomes an open, material archive — a dynamic terrain from which the kinetics of two past accidents can be reconstructed. Ultimately, the research seeks to generate new narratives for the silenced and invisibilised toxic legacies of this contested landscape.

BIO :

Agnès is an artist-researcher based in Belgium. She defended her PhD at the University of Southampton in 2025, with a thesis exploring the nuclear cluster of La Hague (Normandy) through the material witnessing of past and concealed contaminations of rivers and marshlands. The “slow accident” is reframed by attending to the liquid landscape of the nuclear territory and to the capacity of rivers to deterritorialise contamination beyond security perimeters, thereby bearing witness to the Cold War’s radioactive legacies. Agnès teaches photography at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels and develops an artistic practice at the intersection of photography and writing.