Atom Elegy confronts France’s nuclear experiments in Algeria and the far-reaching impact of radioactive fallout. A haunting photograph from 1960 depicts two rows of human-like figures awaiting the detonation of an atomic bomb in the Algerian desert. Through a miniature model reconstruction of the original photograph, “Atom Elegy” (2022) captures the anticipation of nuclear violence as an imminent event occurring in real-time. The catastrophic vision of nuclear destruction, a potent symbol of hubristic modernity, is both sublimated and foregrounded as a testimony to the colonial legacies of territorial destruction and, crucially, the neocolonial will to occupy future realities.

The title “Atom Elegy” refers to the poem, published in 1946, of the same name by the German-French poet Yvan Goll. The poem was composed with the utopian promises of an “age of nuclear power” and attendant ideals of modernism in mind. However, after the detonation of the first atomic bomb, and the destructive violence it unleashed, Goll substantially revised “Atom Elegy”. The original manuscript is in the collection of the civic foundation of the Center for Persecuted Arts in Solingen, Germany.