Artist Statement

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

Safe As Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project is a website and installation examining the atomic history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The project incorporates recently declassified documents and historical photographs available online through the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is Located on 565 square miles of desert in south-eastern Washington State. For more than forty years, Hanford released radioactive materials into the environment and onto an uninformed public while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War era. Although the majority of the releases were due to activities related to production, some were also planned and intentional.

Hanford workers, their families and other downwind residents became guinea pigs for radiation experiments that were carried out at the facility by the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense, and civilian sub-contractors including DuPont and General Electric from 1944 to 1972.

Safe as Mother’s Milk examines these events through declassified historical photographs, media and documents available online at various government archives, like the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System and Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX).

This project illustrates how the internet may be used to investigate, research, and disseminate “unofficial” social and political histories to the public.

• Kim Stringfellow (US) is an artist and educator residing in San Diego, California. Her work addresses ecological, societal and historical issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms involving digital media, photography and installation.     kimstringfellow.com

Full document (PDF) p. 120