Saturday 6th September - Sunday 7th September

LEAKY TRANSMISSIONS is a gathering of artists, archaeologists, citizen scientists, environmentalist and activists hosted at the Othona Community in Bradwell on Sea, Essex. Rather than a formal symposium, this event considers the Blackwater Estuary as a site of encounter to create space together for poetic, theoretical, personal, critical, and challenging exchange.

With a specific focus on the intersection of artistic and archaeological thought, practices and methods, this event foregrounds experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to reflect on changing land-use, environmental media, industrial afterlives and natural and cultural heritage in the present.

Tides ebb and flow. Emerging from the Dengie Peninsula, the Blackwater Estuary’s composition and relationships are multitemporal, with implications reaching far beyond the coast. These include the seventh century Chapel of St. Peter on the Wall built upon the remains of the Roman Othona Fort; sacrifice zones, exclusion zones and the feral effects of colonial uranium extraction from Namibia to Kakadu for UK reactors; the long half-life of irradiated graphite exceeding the human lifespan of a power-plant worker; barely visible remnants of Saxon fish-traps and heavy metal accumulation in cockles; the 2,500 mile migration of dark-bellied brent geese from Siberia to the sucking mudflats of Essex; the transmission of pathogenic avian influenza; the commodity price of wheat and the sustainable practices of the Othona Community. From its beginning in 1946 as a summer camp in tents on the Essex marshes, Othona has been a meeting place for people from different countries and backgrounds.

In 2018 ‘Bradwell A’ was the first UK Magnox nuclear power station to enter ‘Care and Maintenance’, a dormant phase of a long decommissioning process. Public consultation for new nuclear infrastructure on the same site in 2020, brought into focus the Estuary’s ongoing involvement in the nuclear military-industrial complex, and with it questions of power and uncertainty.

If you would like to attend the Saturday as a guest, you can book a day ticket directly through Othona before Wedesday 3rd September for £26. This includes lunch, tea and coffees, and an evening meal.

The nearest train station is Southminster which you can travel to from London Liverpool Street, there is a local bus or taxi that requires pre-booking (B&H Taxis 07896 553610).

If driving use the postcode CM0 7PN which will take you to East Hall Farm. The track to the community is behind the farmhouse on the right. Follow the track through the gate, which will open automatically, and then turn left into the main car park

SCHEDULE

Saturday

09.30 : Introductions to morning session

Nastassja Simensky – Leaky Transmissions

Colin Sterling - Mapping The Energy-Heritage Matrix

Sam Nightingale – A Crystal Image of Time (fieldworking in the Mallee) 

Jonathan Gardner – Taking bricks on holiday: absurd archaeology for troubled times

11.00 : Break for Tea coffee

11.30 – 12:30 : Open Conversation

13.00 : Lunch

14.00 : Tour of the Eleven Acres with Jonney Aldridge

15.00 : Introductions to afternoon session

Angenita Teekens – Nuclear Patchwork

Leigh Brown - The water-land divide / resolution and submergence

YoHa - Wasted on the intertidal zone

16:10 : Break for Tea coffee

16.30 : Open Conversation

18:30 : Dinner

20:00 : Film screening – The Atom: A Love Affair followed but a Q&A with director Vicki Lesley

Sunday

10:00 : Walk to the Chapel of St Peter on the Wall and Bradwell A Nuclear Power Station (3 miles)

13:00 Lunch

PARTICIPANTS

Nastassja Simensky is an artist whose work explores the unevenly distributed impacts of global energy regimes and extractive processes on particular geographies over time, using fieldwork as a central method. Nastassja frequently collaborates with artists and non-artists alike to produce authored and co-authored works across a variety of media—including live performance, sound, text, amateur radio, moving image, and installation. Nastassja coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network and is also one half of MOIST, an independent press for literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.

Colin Sterling is Senior Lecturer in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research. Colin's research focuses on the social, political and ecological dimensions of heritage and museums in the past and the present. He is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues.

Sam Nightingale is a UK-based artist-researcher working at the intersection of environmental media, experimental photography, and speculative fieldwork. His practice investigates “spectral ecologies”—the entangled histories of human and nonhuman life embedded in salt, soil, plants, and in the afterlife of extractive infrastructures. Engaging with communities and interdisciplinary collaborators across Europe, Africa, and Australia, he shares his critical-creative practice through field labs and site-based learning. Drawing on the expressive potential of “natural” elements as elemental media, his work explores how environments function as both carriers of memory and agents of mediation. Nightingale is co-editor of Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research (2024) and has contributed to numerous publications on environmental aesthetics and media theory.

Jonathan Gardner is a contemporary archaeologist and critical heritage studies researcher. His work examines processes of recent and contemporary large-scale landscape transformations in the UK using archaeological methods. Jonathan’s research at the School of History, Classics & Archaeology at Edinburgh, studies the traces of the longstanding exploitation of Scottish hydrocarbon resources as a form of contested heritage.

Jonney Aldridge has been part of the Othona community since 1961. He is a keen environmental advocate, with a passion for wildflowers. Jonney has led on Othona’s renewable energy system and the development of the ‘Eleven Acres’, land that is being restored and remediated after decades of industrial farming to create a wildlife buffer.

Angenita Teekens has 35 years of experience as manager/educator and fundraiser working for the charitable sector alongside a career as a self-employed artist.  She recently left her position in the creative health sector to become  a full time artist. Angenita is convinced that the way forward to a socially and environmentally sustainable world can be achieved by using creative expressions to connect  people of all backgrounds  to their communities and  environment. Her main interest concerns the River Blackwater. Her Sculptural practice MA project  gave her the opportunity to rebuild a derelict pigsty into a small study room through a community project at The Othona Community.  This was followed by a DYCP project Swimming the Nuclear, to research the industries around the River Blackwater, specifically the Nuclear History of Bradwell A. Part of her practice is to experience a close connection with the river through walking, sailing, kayaking and swimming.

Leigh Brown is a designer-researcher, writer, and facilitator of experiences, projects, and programmes. They have spent their career coordinating between local government, non-profits, grassroots groups and residents on community wealth building, participatory governance, and regenerative practice in local places. This work has included providing backbone support for a collective impact initiative, directing the production of public artworks, and convening people to do everything from building community archives to forming local retrofit strategies. Find them pondering power shifts and reparative relations through the lenses of the solidarity economy and municipalism. Leigh enjoys growing, eating, and composting food; cycling; singing; writing poetry; and talking about transformation.

YoHa is an artist group led by Matsuko Yokokoji and Graham Harwood. Their work involves the use of art as a mode of enquiry into technical objects most recently within the fields of health, war, oceans and death. The space of YoHa’s inquiry is usually populated by an interconnection of technical objects and other kinds of bodies as in a clinic, hospital, battlefield or at sea. The focus of their enquiry is where the flows of power can be reconfigured by the ambiguity of art, not necessarily to make art but to make use of it within a wider enquiry. Critical Technical Practice and the use of art allows for connections to be remade, renegotiated outside the rhetoric or logics that govern the space made possible by the interaction of technical individuals, humans and the wider environment.

Vicki Lesley has been working in documentaries for over 20 years. She has developed and made top-rated & award-winning TV shows for broadcasters including the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, Discovery & National Geographic and directed independent short films which have screened at festivals around the world and online. 'The Atom: A Love Affair' is her first feature documentary.

Combining behind-the-scenes political drama with the spirit of a sentimental screen romance, 'The Atom: A Love Affair' charts the social and political development of nuclear power - and our changing relationship with it – since the end of the Second World War. Covering seven eventful decades and focusing particularly on events in the US, UK, France and Germany, the film reveals how the 1950s romantic fantasy of an atom-powered future developed into the stormy, on-off relationship whose drama continues to play out to this day.