Artwork title : memories-jp

Is there anything we have forgotten or left behind in our pursuit of efficiency and development? What have we pushed out of our consciousness, as if it did not exist, and moved on pretending not to know about it?

Japanese live in one of the few countries where they have been exposed to radiation many times, yet they live their lives forgetting everything that has happened, whether recently or in the past.

These events exist as dots, but are they unconnected?

In 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped twice, and the situation was horrific. The war is over. Although nuclear weapons should never be used again, tests are carried out, and in 1954 mariners were exposed to radioactive fallout.

In 2011, a nuclear power station used for peaceful purposes was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami, resulting in a hydrogen explosion and melt-through, forcing the evacuation of the population. The plant is still being decommissioned. Contaminants that cannot be disposed of continue to be released. Low concentrations of contaminated water are being released into the sea.

Lessons need to be learned about how to deal with nuclear energy (or any new form of energy), not just whether it should be used peacefully or not.

The information must first be shared, not hidden and not falsified. We need to remember it well and then consider the way forward.

By trimming what has happened over a certain period, this work brings together memories from several points in time into a single approximate timeline.

This is how I made it, to keep it in my memory.

Hiroshima Prefecture, Peace Memorial Park, Atomic Bomb Dome. Nagasaki Prefecture, Peace Park, Hypocenter Park. Tokyo, Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall. Fukushima Prefecture, Futaba County, Okuma Town, Tomioka Town, etc., were shot in 2015 (only the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall was shot in 2019).

Until now, each of them existed as a point, but now they exist as one piece in this video.

 

The city where no one lives anymore is frighteningly quiet, and all living things seem absent. However, even so, nature is still alive.

 

We are so used to it that we have forgotten that we are constantly making noise(Sound. Matter. Things we cannot control.).

Plants and other biological organisms take them in, digest them, and remove them little by little.

The substances released and absorbed in the video are based on images of the elements. Of course, there is a wide variety of substances in the atmosphere, but I have omitted those less relevant to this video.

Along with a variety of plants that continue to grow in places that are polluted and uninhabitable as of 2015, when the video was shot, some plants live in cities and phoenix trees (second-generation too) exposed to the A-bomb, and that continued to grow from the burnt ruins of Hiroshima.

 

Is there anything we have forgotten or left behind in our pursuit of efficiency and development? We need to rethink them.

I hope that this video will be inspired us to think of things not as points but as lines and as faces.