Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Radon spa bathtubs in the Ore Mountains serve as containers of the invisible. As traces of radioactive water and uranium extraction, they reveal how care, leisure, hard miners work and violence intertwined – and how unseen substances persist and continue to shape the region’s identity.

Paper long abstract

This paper considers bathtubs used in radon spa treatments as objects for thinking with trace, materiality, and invisibility. Across the Ore Mountains (CZ/DE) – a cross-border mining region shaped by centuries of extraction and twentieth-century uranium mining – these bathtubs appear in spa facilities, museums, exhibitions, and public sites.

The bathtubs serve as containers for the invisible. They hold the transformation of mine wastewater, infused with radioactive radon, into spa water. Radon spas translated an uncertain and invisible radioactive material into therapeutic practice. Bathtubs mediate this translation by domesticating radon-infused water, materialising an ambivalent relationship to radioactivity that is simultaneously feared and therapeutically employed.

At the same time, during the second half of the twentieth century, spa environments obscured the violent infrastructures that enabled such treatments, including forced labour, environmental contamination, and displacement linked to uranium mining.

Drawing on theories of trace, material memory, and object biographies, we treat bathtubs as loci where absence and presence intersect. Exhibited bathtubs no longer contain radioactive material, yet remain shaped by it–marked by a substance that was only ever sensed indirectly, through instruments like Geiger counters and bodily symptoms.

By experimentally following bathtubs across borders and curatorial regimes in Bohemia and Saxony, the paper reveals complex entanglements of mines and spas, waste and value, harm and cure, visibility and invisibility. Attending to these containers of the invisible opens a radical analytical possibility: to rethink transitions not through visible remediation alone, but through the lingering traces of substances and histories that resist full containment.