“Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?” opens Mother by Pink Floyd, a song born out of a historical moment marked by pervasive nuclear anxiety. Today, in an international context that revives that very same unease, these words resonate anew, evoking a fear that has reentered our collective consciousness and revealing how our perception of the atomic threat is deeply shaped by the forms through which we imagine and represent it.
The atomic bomb lives in collective memory primarily as image, shaped and layered over time through archival photographs, documentaries, science fiction cinema, video games, news media, and artificial intelligence. This complex visual body is the product of ongoing cultural and visual mediation, which has forged a shared iconography.
What images arise when we think of the atomic? What does contemporary visual culture reveal about how the nuclear threat is conceived today?
This project emerges from these questions. By photographing screens, it captures visual fragments from video materials sourced online, fragments that are not only direct testimonies, but also cultural interpretations and reworkings. These mediated images, through their circulation, actively contribute to constructing and consolidating the iconography of the nuclear threat.
The work thus takes shape as a visual archive of the invisible, focused on the space between fact and representation. Working on existing images, it traces how the atomic imaginary has been formed, spread and sedimented within the media, becoming part of our visual and symbolic language.
“Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us.” — Seth Baum, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists