Active Spaces

Tor Seidel

A glowing future, today almost past; although offline still radioactive for incomprehensible spans of time to come: a look into the abyss of time is demanded of us, a look that rocked geology around 1800 – the creation of the earth estimated millions of years ago and never finished, the unity of natural and human history an illusion. Is it still possible to approach objects artistically, objects that are buried under moral verdicts like wrecked specimens of their species under concrete, without an immediate intention to intervene? Not with descriptive industrial archaeology in any case. Tor Seidel’s interior views of these nuclear worlds instead take a roundabout route via a linguistic and pictorial representation of these hermetic spheres in order to push onward into the speculative space of a primeval atomic theory without atomic physics, to the invisible “seeds of things” from “time everlasting” evoked by Lucretius. In this view, the concept of contamination extends that much further – as a shadow on mankind’s whole connection to nature. Bodo-Michael Baumunk