BLACK NOISE [A Trinity Trilogy] — Sanne Peper

Las Vegas, the mid-1950s. A favorite pastime of the era was to take a cocktail up to the top of a casino in the morning, to search the northern horizon for a flash of light or a mushroom cloud and toast America’s superpower ascendancy. (Joseph Masco, Desert Modernism, Cabinet Magazine.)

BLACK NOISE [A Trinity Trilogy] is the title of a three-part study in which I use nature as a metaphor to visualize certain issues concerning the idea and implications of the atomic bomb. The title of this triptych refers to the code name for the first nuclear test, which was carried out near the town of Alamogordo in the desert of New Mexico, but it also alludes to the three most important economic powers of that era: the U.S., Japan and the Soviet Union. With a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Sanne Peper traveled to Los Alamos and the surrounding area [Splendid Isolation, a Past 2006, 2008, 2009], to Hiroshima and Nagasaki [Mono No Aware, a Present 2007-2008] and to Chernobyl [Stalker, a Future 2008]. The subtitles a past, a present and a future reflect the conviction that there is no such thing as the history or the truth, although there are certainly possible histories and potential futures. This project is a very subjective attempt to grasp the overwhelming idea of total annihilation through nuclear weapons.