Video: The Lens of Fukishima
Julie Salverson (Queen’s University) and Peter C. Van Wyck (Concordia University)
Presented at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes symposium, hosted by OCAD University and the University of Toronto,
As part of a long-term, ongoing project concerning the material, cultural, and symbolic geographies of the nuclear, in April 2015 we went to do fieldwork in Japan. Over the course of three weeks we spoke with scholars and artists, peace and anti-nuclear activists, educators and others; documented survivor trees in Hiroshima and tsunami stones on the Sanriku coast – trying to take measure of the long and thick line that joins Hiroshima and Fukushima. For as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, we cannot “ignore what is suggested by the rhyme of these two names, for rhyme gathers together – reluctantly against all poetry – the ferment of something shared.” Through field notes, analysis, and reflection we will consider the nature – and structure – of the lens that might be appropriate to understand this something shared; the moments of encounter, the gathering together of images of the fixed and the exposed.