CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - ANAÏS MAURER AITA ATOMI : MĀ’OHI ARTISTS AGAINST NUCLEAR COLONIALISM
With a collective payload hundreds of times that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, French nuclear tests constitute an apocalyptic event that ushered the end of a world in Mā’ohi Nui. In a new monograph entitled ’Aita Atomi, Anaïs Maurer retraces the half-century of Mā’ohi artistic resistance to the bomb, from the 1960s to the present. Despite censorship, political pressures, and economic coercion, antinuclear resistance flourished in the interstices of creative expression afforded by songs, dances, drawings, novels, poems, plays, and graffiti. Exploring an extensive, transdisciplinary, and multilingual corpus of antinuclear art, Maurer argues that Mā’ohi artists retrieve the traces left by the most marginalized victims of nuclear colonialism, by exposing the gendered consequences of fallout and giving a voice to the stolen generation of stillborn babies. Refusing to forget this tragic history, antinuclear art offers a cathartic space through which to express the ongoing emotions associated with half a century of state lies, medical negligence, and environmental racism.