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Fallout Restoration, Installation - 2022

Fallout Restoration imagines the invisible labor required to make the world habitable. Set within the aftermath of an unspecified catastrophe, a group of blackened feminine bodies move through an endless cycle of tending, cleaning, carrying, and repair. Their work is perpetual, yet almost imperceptible, sustaining a space that appears whole only because of their continuous effort.

The installation draws conceptually from black body radiation and the ultraviolet catastrophe. In physics, an ideal black body absorbs all incident radiation, taking in every wavelength of light before re-emitting energy. Fallout Restoration extends this idea beyond the scientific model. Here, the black body becomes a social body, one that endlessly absorbs the excesses of the world, its violence, toxicity, and fallout.

The imagined nuclear fallout is less a historical event than a condition. Radiation functions as a metaphor for the unseen burdens that accumulate across social and political life. These bodies absorb what cannot remain in the environment, continuously laboring to transform contamination into the possibility of living.

An accompanying augmented reality layer reveals agents otherwise hidden from view. Occupying the same physical space as the installation, these invisible workers continue the acts of clearing and restoration beyond the limits of the visible world. The AR intervention suggests that care itself often exists in an unseen register, its presence registered only through the conditions it makes possible.

Fallout Restoration asks what it means to inhabit a world sustained by invisible labor, and who bears the responsibility of absorbing its accumulated debris. The work proposes care not as sentiment, but as continuous maintenance: an endless process of repair performed by bodies that remain largely unseen.