Salt-Lined Margaritas & Nuclear Future(s)
Taewoo Kim
Our collective interest lies in developing interdisciplinary methodologies that transform architectural speculation into critical commentary on contemporary conditions. Our emerging practice aims to decipher hidden power structures, social dynamics and environmental tensions within built environments, investigating the stakes of our collective futures.
Through the Architectural Association, we have organised Visiting Schools exploring publishing and narrative filmmaking in architecture. At UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, we contributed research on “Languages of the Future,” speculating on alternative archiving methodologies. As production participants for the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, we realised a large-scale installation at Forte Marghera, designing and curating an exhibition with multidisciplinary teams including structural engineers and environmental researchers, utilising specialised glass and metal casting techniques.
Our collaborations and experience working with Cream Projects, MYLOMARK Production and Publishing, RIXC, Cinematic Landscape Exchange, Labocine and WCCA reflect our engagement across architecture, media, and cultural production platforms.
Through the LINA fellowship, we aim to advance our interdisciplinary spatial research while connecting with European institutions that share our commitment to architecture as a tool for understanding and transforming contemporary conditions.
The European Green Deal sets a clear target: net-zero by 2050. Yet, the EU is set to miss majority of targets, raising doubts about the adequacy of current decarbonisation plans. Nuclear energy, heavily debated, remains excluded from EU climate frameworks. Instead of arguing for or against its inclusion, we ask: what could change if it were reconsidered now?
Our starting point is the Mediterranean, where in July 2025 Core Power (UK) together with the American Bureau of Shipping and Athlos Energy (Greece) announced a commercial programme for molten salt-powered floating nuclear power plants - piloting next-gen nuclear in post-carbon Europe.
Speculating on this maritime nuclear future, we propose to imagine a tripartite trans-regional system, including coastal EU nations leasing waters for FNPPs, inland regions receiving energy (and its immediate/slower legacies), with the EU as a geopolitical matchmaker. Kosovo, landlocked and peripheral to nuclear discourse, is of particular interest to us as a lens through which to look at the implications of possible nuclear present(s) and future(s) architecturally, systemically (politically and infrastructurally) and, inevitably, culturally.
From Stalker, to Silkwood, to Twin Peaks and contemporary anxieties, the radioactive imaginary has long permeated public consciousness. Yet today, nuclear energy is politically toxic, marginalised from environmental discourse. We don't claim this future is desirable, but treat it as a possible scenario within a landscape of constrained options. From FNPPs floating off Mykonos to salt lining the rim of your margarita glass in a Pristina bar, we aim to explore the short-/long-term consequences of nuclear fission via a speculative research publication and a CGI documentary set in 3030.
With Plutonium-239’s half-life exceeding 24,110 years, we invite LINA members & fellows to probe this transition's aftermath - moving from coastlines to custodial hinterlands and into deep time.