HANFORD REACH INSTALLATION > Photographs and Video

Salsolas
2023


Part of the floor-projected video sequence created collaboratively for the installation. Concepts and photography, Glenna Cole Allee.
Video animation by Michael Paulus, and by Phillip Mudd.

Salsolas:
Rolling from their origins on the steppes of Asia to stow away and cross the Atlantic by schooner, Salsolas, a.k.a. tumbleweeds, eventually found their way across the silver screens of Hollywood. They became classic icons of the Hollywood Western. Tumbleweeds manifest the principle of drift: the truth that nothing is permanently attached, and nothing can ever be permanently contained.

Reaching twenty feet and more below ground-surface, Salsola taproots search out anything buried below. One percent of Salsolas tested at Hanford are radioactive. For decades, radioactive tumbleweeds on the reservation were tagged, then burned.