Mutant Space, Metsamor

For more information: http://mutantspace.net/metsamor

Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia
Atif Akin, 2015, Metsamor, Armenia

Mutant Space is a research driven, technoscientifically critical, visual art project about nuclear power and radioactivity. e project visually spans across vast amount of time and space, from BC 3 billion years to AC 240,000 years, from satellite images from 300,000 meters above ground to 520 meters underground. Metsamor is one of the episodes of this ongoing project and focuses on the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant located in Armenia, at the border of Turkey.

Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant operates with an early Soviet design reactor and is both technically and politically connected with Chernobyl. They were constructed and commissioned around the same times by the same authorities and they were both build as a result of the same geopolitical strategy of the USSR. Although there are slight technical differences in their reactor structures, they both lack the containment structure.

Metsamor archaeological site, the “Black Swamp”, is located 25 kilometers west of Yerevan. It is a Bronze Age city, of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, when copper mining took place on a major scale, and it was a major source of bronze production. However it continued to be a major site in the Urartian period (9th to 6th centuries BC), and was settled in the Middle Ages. e modern town of Metsamor was built in 1969 to house the employees of the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant.

Noah’s Ark is one of the many stories shared by Turkish and Armenian societies. e Bible writes that it landed on the mount of Ararat.

Mount Aragats is an four-peaked volcano massif in Armenia. It is home to many Stalin era scienti c research establishments including cosmic ray research at the high altitude station which started in 1943, Byurakan Observatory center and Radiophysics Research Institute.

Metsamor lies between these two sacred mountains.

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