By tracing the rhetorical ecology of an iconic protest logo created in Denmark in 1975, this article sheds light on an important part of the rhetoric of the Danish (and global) anti-nuclear power movement and how it continues to influence collective life in unpredictable and contradictory ways. Initially, the logo created a sense of community amongst anti-nuclear power activists. It was a powerful recruitment and fundraising tool, now it circulates as nostalgia, sparking both solidarity and alienation. The article builds on interviews with members of the Danish anti-nuclear power movement and a group of Danish youth today, including the founder of a current pro-nuclear power group. It relies on theories of rhetorical agency and ecology that have pinpointed the unpredictability and interconnectedness of rhetoric, and reminds us, further, of rhetoric’s potential endurance.

In 2010 the Danish artist Søren Thilo Funder was in Cairo to produce the art film Disastrous Dialogue. As Funder set to work he had a foreboding about how politically charged the piece might be. When he cut the film, however, events had exceeded his most fateful premonitions, reshaping the interpretative context completely. The changes in Egyptian society, thus, altered the possible meaning–agency relations of the finished work. Through a close reading and a conceptually guided criticism of the text–context relationships of Disastrous Dialogue we explore interrelations of meaning and agency through the lens of the concept of plasticity. This leads us to propose a plastic understanding of agency as both formed by and formative of meaningful relationships—and able to creatively destruct and, thereby, transform configurations of meaning.