In Viriditas Thoms conjures the animistic and relational tendencies of an often disregarded European ancestry - the vibrant premodern alchemical tradition. In doing so Viriditas questions the history and tenacity of Modernity’s imperial practices of extraction, exploitation, desacralization, and colonial rule.
Viriditas is the outcome of collaborative fieldwork into the state of European fusion energy. The collaboration was supported by a Creating Earth Futures commission from the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities in 2018. Thoms engaged in fieldwork at the ‘Joint European Tokamak’ (JET) in the UK and the ‘International Thermonuclear Energy Research’ (ITER) megaproject under construction in France.
Current research in experimental fusion reactors, and its more than 70-year history of repeated failure, suggests that this ‘clean’, water fueled nuclear energy will always remain thirty years away, in the future perfect. Yet workers, not unlike the medieval cathedral builders of the middle ages, nonetheless strive to build these vast energy centralising technologies even though they will never themselves see completed.
As Thoms investigates what is meant by ‘green’, he elaborates on Viriditas “a word that means vitality, fecundity, lushness, verdure, or growth. A greenness particularly associated with abbess Hildegard von Bingen… the 12th century polymath who used the term to refer to or symbolize spiritual and physical health”.
Viriditas reflects on nuclearity, coloniality, the pursuit of knowledge and energy, and the constructed divide between nature/culture. A 'clean' nuclear fusion energy source, if such a thing were possible, would contribute to a more sustainable society, but Viriditas also re-situates scientific knowledge in its long lineage dating back through millenia of pursuit when earthly materials themselves were considered knowledgable.
Viriditas was performed at Raven Row, London in 2019; during the exhibition Logics of Sense Blackwood Gallery, U of Toronto, 2020, and; was installed in the exhibitions Power to the People, EUROfusion Expo, 2021; Vision Creep, Pleasure
Dome, Toronto 2021; Profanations, Porto and Lisbon, 2023; The Measure of the World, RADIUS, Delft, 2023.
