The Well of Introspection, 2025
Film still, Resonant Chambers
Archiving the Invisible:
The Hauntology of the Nuclear
2024-2025
Film, research, architecture
Sellafield, UK
Archiving the Invisible investigates the “nuclear unconscious” as a collective and cultural force shaping memory and representation. Lingering in the shadow of Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant in the North of England, the project aims to illuminate the invisible trauma of nuclear disaster through architectural, spatial, and visual media.
Through the entanglement of human and more-than-human ecologies, the project considers nuclear trauma not as a contained historical event, but as something that persists materially across bodies, landscapes and generations. Radioactive water becomes both medium and archive: carrying invisible histories of contamination towards uncertain ecological futures.
Sellafield itself is an archive - a physical and psychological witness to an invisible history. This place holds not only the haunting of past accidents but also future consequences that will affect generations to come. Currently, toxic waste buried underground here will persist until 2125.
Explored through the primary medium of film, the project aims to make sense of this intangible legacy by investigating not just what we see, but what remains hidden.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/23/nuclear-waste-leaking-2100-litres-contaminated-water-day/
URGENCY
Sellafield has the largest stockpile of
plutonium in the world, submerged within vast fuel storage tanks. It takes plutonium-239 24,000 years to decay. From these tanks, 2,100 litres of radioactive water are leaking per day into the environment, at a rate of 24.3 ml/second.
The leaking water, containing
radioactive tritium, strontium-90, and
caesium-137, could continue into the late 2040s. By this time 15 million litres of radioactive water will have migrated towards the Irish Sea and bioaccumulated in the ecosystem.
Beyond Containment, 2025
Film still, Archiving the Invisible
LIQUID INFRASTRUCTURES
Contamination is not static but migratory, continually reshaped through the movement of water. Holding traces of past contamination while carrying radionuclides into uncertain futures, water forms a multi-temporal counter-archive through which nuclear space is understood as fluid, networked and spatially dispersed.
Attention is shifted away from conventional structures of containment, such as reactors, silos and repositories, towards the invisible infrastructures buried beneath them. Seepage zones, groundwater monitoring wells and oceanic dispersal pathways become sites through which the migration of radioactive water can be traced. Through a hydro-topographical reading of the landscape, the research follows contamination as it moves across land, water and atmosphere, revealing pathways that exceed the architectural and institutional boundaries designed to contain them. Water therefore becomes both a method of investigation and a challenge to the imperial myth of stable containment: a fluid archive carrying the material traces of nuclear activity beyond the site and into uncertain ecological futures.
ARCHIVING THE INVISIBLE, 2025
Experimental documentary · 9 min 3 sec
Archiving the Invisible is an experimental documentary combining archival footage and testimony from communities surrounding Sellafield with original footage of the nuclear site and landscape. Through the collision of institutional histories, personal memory and contemporary observation, the film examines the psychological unease of an invisible contamination whose consequences exceed human perception and temporal scale.
Territories of Containment, 2025
Site mapping, Sellafield
MAPPING THE SUBMERGED
Hydro-topographical mapping shifts the architectural reading of Sellafield from its visible structures towards the subterranean infrastructures beneath them. Moving across scales, the research traces the relationship between the nuclear site, groundwater networks and the monitoring wells through which invisible contamination is observed.
Territories of Containment, 2025
Site mapping, Sellafield
Subterranean Network, 2025
Groundwater monitoring infrastructure, Sellafield
GROUNDWATER MONITORING WELL, 2025
1:5 cross-sectional drawing
Sellafield Limited monitors the spread of radioactive contamination through 250 groundwater monitoring wells. The wells are instruments of state and corporate surveillance designed to control, measure, and contain contamination.
These groundwater monitoring wells mark a threshold between surface infrastructure and the contaminated landscape beneath. Designed to observe and quantify the movement of groundwater, the well becomes the point of departure for a speculative architectural inquiry: transforming an instrument of institutional surveillance into a space through which nuclear contamination might instead be encountered.
FROM INSTRUMENT TO ARCHITECTURE
The visual narrative marks the transition from hydrological research to architectural speculation. The groundwater monitoring well is reimagined as a submerged spatial experience, where rising water, reflection, sound and intergenerational memory transform an instrument of environmental surveillance into an architecture of nuclear trauma. The geometry of the monitoring well was abstracted into a fragmented mirrored environment, using reflection to destabilise conventional spatial boundaries.
Resonant Chambers: Descent into the Nuclear Unconscious, 2025
Film storyboard / architectural narrative
Submerged Landscape, 2025
Projection study, mirrored film model
The speculative architecture was materialised as a scaled, mirrored diorama designed specifically for the camera. The model became a filmmaking instrument through which projection, reflection, sound and moving image produced a disorientating spatial experience. Translating the well from an instrument of observation into an immersive perceptual chamber, water, landscape and image multiply across its reflective surfaces. Architecture emerges through film.
RESONANT CHAMBERS, 2025
Experimental film · 11 min 12 sec
Resonant Chambers takes the form of a speculative nuclear future, visualising a sensorial descent into the submerged architectures of nuclear trauma. Rising radioactive water becomes both medium and archive, carrying invisible histories of contamination through an architecture that trembles with impulse responses, intergenerational testimony and mythic echoes. As thresholds between personal memory, ecological contamination, and institutional neglect begin to dissolve, the well emerges as a site of political and ethical rupture, its traces resonating into an uncertain future.
RELATED WRITING
A Toxic Legacy: Domestication, Colonisation and Care at the Sellafield Nuclear Facility
Selected References
Bickerstaff, K. (2022). Living on with Sellafield: Nuclear Infrastructure, Slow Violence, and the Politics of Quiescence. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(4), pp. 955–970.
Caren, V. (2021). Sellafield Stories. North West Sound Heritage.
Carpenter, E. (ed.) (2016). The Nuclear Culture Source Book. London: Black Dog Publishing.
CORE (2020). Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment. CORE Cumbria.
Davies, H. (2012). Sellafield Stories. Constable.
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books.
Grosz, E. (2004). The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke University Press.
Heim, W. (2020). X = 2140.
Heim, W. (2021). The Times of Caring in a Nuclear World: Sculpture, Contamination and Stillness. Arts, 11(1).
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.
Law, E. (2018). What Is Sellafield? Cleaning Up Our Nuclear Past: Faster, Safer and Sooner. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
National Audit Office (2024). Decommissioning Sellafield: Managing Risks from the Nuclear Legacy. London: National Audit Office.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Schwab, G. (2020). Radioactive Ghosts. University of Minnesota Press.
The Sellafield Story (2022–ongoing). Exhibition. The Beacon Museum, Whitehaven.
The Guardian (2012). The Story of Sellafield Nuclear Power Station – in Pictures. The Guardian.