The Radiant (2012)
Single screen Installation , 64 min 14 sec, HD video, colour, sound, stereo
The Radiant explores the aftermath of 11 March 2011, when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan triggered a vast tsunami that devastated towns and communities along the Pacific coast. The Great East Japan Earthquake resulted in 19,729 deaths, with a further 2,559 people recorded as missing and 6,233 injured. Around 470,000 people were displaced in the immediate aftermath, approximately 122,000 buildings were completely destroyed, and extensive damage was sustained by roads, railways, electricity, gas and water systems. The tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing reactor meltdowns and the release of radioactive material. Approximately 110,000 people were evacuated from areas surrounding the plant.
The film essay takes on the difficult task of representing the invisible aftermath of nuclear fallout, travelling through time and space to bring the historical promises of nuclear energy into proximity with the threats of radiation in Japan’s illuminated cities and evacuated villages.
The film connects the specific catastrophe of 3.11 to a longer history; 2011 is brought into relation with 1970, 1954 and 1945, beginning with the reconstruction of Tokyo after the Second World War. These temporal layers place Fukushima within a history of atomic power, environmental danger and the Anthropocene, bringing science, geology and human time into a necropolitical reading of the present.
1945 marks the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the radioactive black rain that followed the bombing of Hiroshima. In 1954, the United States detonated the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Radioactive fallout travelled far beyond the designated test zone, contaminating the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru, or Lucky Dragon No. 5, and exposing its twenty three crew members to radiation. The incident returned the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the present while altering the geography of atomic exposure: radiation could travel across oceans, enter food supplies and affect populations far beyond the site of detonation. In Japan, the incident helped galvanise a mass antinuclear movement.
From this longer history, atomic power appears as a Promethean endeavour in which science and technology assume control over the fundamental processes of chain reactions. The philosopher Günther Anders, writing in the 1950s in The Antiquatedness of the Human Species, understood atomic power in relation to this Promethean dimension.
The title The Radiant refers to those who feel themselves to be all powerful through their identification with atomic power. It also refers to Japan itself and, within it, to Tokyo. Early in the film, Tokyo appears from the 52nd floor of the Mori Tower as a City of Light. Fukushima lies far to the northeast, provincial and distant from the metropolis whose demand for energy it serves. The relation between the illuminated city and the nuclear landscape forms one scale of relation.
Another concerns invisibility. The Honshu coast, and Fukushima within it, retains traditions of local and household gods, gods of the sea, rain and soil, to whom households pay tribute. The photographer and theorist Chihiro Minato describes radiation as adding another order of invisibility to this existing invisible world, creating what he calls a “double invisible landscape”.
The Radiant turns on the unseen. A sequence in which the camera is dismantled demonstrates the limits of an apparatus confronted by something it cannot see. Radiation has no necessary visual presence. Much of Fukushima appears banal and overgrown, without the appearance of a landscape in which catastrophe has taken place. Minato calls this the “anti ruin”.
The Geiger counter introduces another mode of perception. Its sounds combine with birdsong, producing a trilling and trebling sonic field. The Geiger counter does not simply produce sound. It produces a reading. Where the camera cannot see radioactive hotspots, the counter registers radiation accumulating in drains, gutters and places where water has become stagnant.
The Radiant brings image, sound, measurement, archive and montage into relation with a catastrophe that exceeds the image. Radiation persists in bodies, water, food, soil and infrastructure while the landscape assumes the appearance of ordinary life. As Sabu Kohso writes in Radiation and Revolution, Fukushima was “made less and less visible by the normalization of mutation and transmutation”, even as “the slow process of radiation is spreading.”
Commissioned as part of dOCUMENTA (13), with generous support from Project 88.