#07 Mitochronia : Participant : Shuhei Kono
'The centre cannot live alone'. mixed media. 2026
“the centre cannot live alone” is a play on words linking nuclei and nukes. In contemporary society, nuclear weapons function as deterrents and as justifications for war, while nuclear power stations are promoted as a response to global warming, despite producing high-level radioactive waste that must be managed for at least one hundred thousand years. Faced with these vast nuclear issues, human thought often seems almost paralysed by their scale and duration. By contrast, the relation between nuclei and mitochondria suggests that life is not sustained by a sovereign centre, but by distributed cooperation, vulnerability and exposure. This work explores the relation between nuclear existence and mitochondrial beings not as a simple opposition, but as a relational condition shaped by coexistence, dependency, and intrusion. Their metabolic interplay resonates with the fragile and ephemeral lives around Sizewell power station, where local life persists beside infrastructures that operate on almost unimaginable timescales.
Shuhei Kono is an artist based between the UK and Japan, working across moving image, sound, text, and installation. Born in a town next to a nuclear power station, facing an open bay where his relatives still live, he approaches nuclear worlds as conditions embedded in memory, landscape, and responsibility. Informed by posthumanist and cybernetic thought, his practice traces fragile entanglements of technology and flesh, ecology and political systems, and human and nonhuman worlds. He is drawn to the points where care, survival, and responsibility become unevenly distributed across bodies, systems, and environments. Through speculative forms and shifting material languages, he explores nuclearity not only as violence or failure, but as a planetary condition through which residue, dependence, and vulnerability quietly persist. He is currently studying on the Graduate Diploma in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London
Website: https://www.instagram.com/shuheionok?igsh=MXBrd2Y4cDNhb3dqaQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr/
