Hikaru Fujii, A Nuclear Museology

Artist and filmmaker Hikaru Fujii has spent the last few years working in the region of Tohoku, a zone particularly affected by the triple catastrophe of March 11th 2011: an earthquake, a tsunami, and finally a nuclear disaster. With his ongoing project Les nucléaires et les choses, further developed during a residency at the KADIST Foundation in Paris, the artist looks to reconstruct the history of a place fragmented by disaster, focusing not on the catastrophe itself, but on the fallout.

Objects and history

The project comprises numerous elements, including one film that follows a meeting between art-world specialists, curators, philosophers, and cultural representatives, discussing the future of the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore, located in the ‘difficult to return’ zone that had to close due to high levels of radioactivity. The sombre video dramatises and televises the kind of conversation that would usually take place behind closed doors, letting us all in on the kinds of questions that link together art, objects, memory, museums, and the changeability of disaster.

One photo series from Futaba presents another aspect of such a reality: caved roofs, shattered windows, abandoned toys, an eerily abandoned scene. These are juxtaposed with the cosseted and shrouded objects, waiting for their fate in clinical white gowns, these objects considered worth saving.

Hikaru Fujii has also produced other work on the disaster, including the film Project Fukushima, focusing on an art and music festival in the infamous region that took place just five months after the tragedy. His artistic practice is deeply entrenched in contemporary social events, which he records and documents as works of historiography. As such, he is often interested in the role of museums as places that preserve and continue certain historical narratives, but which are themselves susceptible to contemporary contingencies.

Hikaru Fujii’s work was featured in a solo show at the KADIST Foundation, Paris in 2019 and has since been featured as part of the group exhibition Things Entangling at MOT Tokyo in 2020.

Les nucléaires et les choses (2011-2019) a project by Hikaru Fujii available on his website.