Conversation 3: Rony Emmenegger
Context¶
In May 2025, geographer and researcher Rony Emmenegger joined my studio in Olten for the third conversation with Splicer. Rony’s research focuses on the deep geological storage of radioactive waste in Switzerland, an area where time, politics, science, and landscape intersect in complex ways. His work examines not only how geological knowledge is produced and institutionalized, but how it becomes politically charged, publicly negotiated, and visually communicated.
As a geographer, Rony is interested in how expertise, rock formations, and deep time are rendered legible to the public. The topic of deep-time storage demands temporal projections that stretch over hundreds of millions of years, far beyond the scale of human perception. Rony's interest lies in how this speculative horizon is made communicable, through data, diagrams, visualizations, but also through aesthetic strategies such as museal installations that mediate complex geological realities for broader societal understanding.
This thematic overlap made the collaboration with Splicer uniquely resonant. Rony brought not only geological expertise but also a keen interest in how science and infrastructure are visually represented. He was particularly focused on the depiction and interpretation of Opalinus clay, the sedimentary rock layer chosen as the most suitable host for Switzerland’s future nuclear waste repository.
The collaboration offered a space to reflect on shared inquiries that animate both disciplines. These include how we visualize the invisible and how we give form to time. They also involve considering how the photograph, as both image and artefact, can serve as a tool for engaging with uncertainty, memory, and speculation about the deep underground.
Deep Time and the Politics of Temporal Representation¶
A central thread throughout the conversation is the difficulty and necessity of grappling with deep geological time in the context of radioactive waste storage. Rony emphasized that while the time scales involved (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) appear to exceed human cognition, they are not beyond imagination; rather, they require new cognitive frameworks and representational tools.
This includes both scientific abstraction and aesthetic mediation. The core sample becomes a material point of entry into these vast time horizons.
Aesthetic Reframing inspired by Scientific Representation¶
Rony and Florian reflected on how core samples are conventionally visualized in scientific workflows: their surface is optically scanned, their image of the surface is digitally unrolled, then categorized and catalogued. In the Conversation with Splicer they explicitly deviated from this norm of the surface, choosing instead to focus on the core’s broken end.
«The usual goal is to capture [a drill core] as completely as possible. Wherever it's damaged, it can't really be used properly anymore. What we did today is exactly the opposite. We're using the end of the drill core and going beyond the purely scientifically inspired representation of the core. And one wants to consider how the transition works – from the drill core outward and at the end of the drill core, where one also begins to look inside.»
Rony Emmenegger, May 2025.
This opens up questions about the status of the image: When does a rock sample stop being data and start becoming an artifact? What does it mean to visualize a core not for calibration or measurement, but for resonance, ambiguity, and speculative reflection?
Surface, Depth, and the Limits of Knowing¶
«The statement about what is actually inside the core sample is always accompanied by a certain degree of uncertainty. Admittedly, this uncertainty is largely marginal. But perhaps more importantly, it symbolically reflects the fact that any extrapolated statements about the composition of the entire geological subsurface, its past and consequently its future, based solely on the core sample are inherently linked to uncertainty. In this way, the depth, the loss of sharpness with depth in the image [The image created with Spicer], symbolically represents the uncertainties involved in geological investigations of the underground, which are always, in their entirety, tied to a degree of the unknown. It also stands as a metaphor for the uncertainties inherent in making long term projections into the future, statements about how the rock will develop once radioactive waste is stored within it.»
Rony Emmenegger, May 2025.
The broken end of the core, used as the focal point in the Splicer image, becomes a metaphor for partial knowledge and the aesthetics of uncertainty. Rony speaks of how the sharp surface markings (from drilling) contrast with the obscured, blurred inner layers of the core. The resulting image collapses these two registers: technical precision and soft indeterminacy.
This tension mirrors broader themes in Rony’s research. Scientific knowledge is never total, and our access to geological futures is always mediated, situated, and contingent. The image thus becomes a site where clarity and uncertainty coexist.
The Sample¶
Rony brought a cylindrical core sample of Opalinus Clay, a sedimentary rock formation currently under consideration as Switzerland’s primary host layer for the deep geological storage of radioactive waste. The core was not extracted from one of the official boreholes used in current site investigations but originates from the Mont Terri rock laboratory in St. Ursanne, where Opalinus Clay lies close to the surface. This particular core is most probably a discarded sample, the official core samples from potential deep storage sites are stored in laboratories. Yet still this drill core is materially representative of the opalinus clay's properties. With a diameter of roughly 3.2 cm and a length of about 25–30 cm, the sample carries visible traces of its extraction: spiral markings from the drilling process and a fracture at both ends, where the stone has broken along a slanted geological strata plane. While not a scientific sample per se, the core remains deeply symbolic as a material witness to deep time and as a proxy for a larger, politically and ethically charged infrastructural project.
On Splicer, rather than reproducing the scientific convention of scanning and unrolling a core’s surface into a flat image, Rony and Florian worked with Splicer to reframe the object through a different logic. They focused especially on the fractured end of the core, where the inner stratification of the clay is momentarily exposed. By choreographing the movement of the core in front of Splicer’s lens, they sampled an image in which surface and depth collapse into one another. The result evokes both a landscape and a diagram: the outer surface glows with an almost metallic sheen, showing the scratches from the drilling process horizontally through the frame. The broken interior on the upper half of the of the image dissolves into softness and blur, suggesting a landscape of both erosion and interiority. The lighting unexpectedly highlighted mica-like textures, giving the sediment a visual quality closer to metamorphic rock than soft clay. What emerged was not just a documentation of materiality, but a speculative rearticulation of geological time, human intervention, and the ambiguity between evidence and imagination.