The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2nd edition)

by Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur

We entrust readers with forty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images — one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other. Through words and images, we wish to contribute our humble share to a collaborative grappling with the event of Chernobyl. Unthinkable and unrepresentable as it is, we insist on the need to reflect upon, signify, and symbolize it, taking stock of the consciousness it fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.

Author Bios

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. An author of eleven books and over 150 articles, he is a specialist in phenomenology, political thought, and environmental philosophy. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust (2016), Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (2017) and, with Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being (2017). For more information on his work consult his webpage http://michaelmarder.org

Anaïs Tondeur is a visual artist. She works and lives in Paris. She has been commissioned to work as an artist in residence with the scientists from the Natural History Museum as well as Pierre and Marie Curie University, Sorbonne, Paris in 2015 and at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, Paris in 2015, Hydrodynamics Laboratory (LadHyx) at Ecole Polytechnique, National Centre for Scientific Research, France (2013-2015). She is currently undertaking a research on urban soils with anthropologists, geographers and ecologists as part of Chamarande’s lab curated by COAL (Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions shown nationally and internationally. GV Art, London represents Anaïs’s work. Anaïs graduated from a M.A. in Mixed-Media at the Royal College of Art in London in 2010 after completing a Bachelor (Hons) Textiles at Central Saint Martins College in London in 2008. See more of her work at http://www.anais-tondeur.com/.