react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Nestled between two University of Chicago buildings, stands Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture, Nuclear Energy, which commemorates the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s scientific achievement of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Placed purposefully on the site where the creation took place, the sculpture not only signals a direct locally minded recognition of its spatial history but remains inextricably linked to global sites elsewhere through its implicated technological and discursive resonance that has transpired since the proliferation of atomic as well as nuclear matters. Since the monument’s positioning on the institution’s campus in 1967, the piece of public art has been returned to and activated by a wide range of artistic and civic communities. This paper introduces how these ensuing interactions, those between the monument and its visitors, can alter the evolution of a public work of art’s cultural heritage. It is simultaneously the sculpture’s attachment to proximal and distal relationships, to those physical and discursive sites elsewhere driven by atomic as well as nuclear cultures, that elucidate the capability of scalable, intersectional, and transnational connections. Nuclear Energy, then, is a case-study in how public art and public collectives might enjoin in memory work to redirect and alter ongoing narratives with new spatio-historical messages for a radical future.