Category Archives: works

2012, works

Kein Licht – Epilog?

A tour performance exploring the distance
between Fukushima and Tokyo

This was a staging of the “epilogue” text to Kein Licht, Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s text that deals with the Fukushima accident, performed as a “tour” of the Shinbashi area in central Tokyo. The Shimbashi area has played an important role in the history of Japanese nuclear power policy. The district is the location of the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Company, while the start point for the tour, the New Shimbashi Building, opened in the same year as the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

  Participants were given 12 postcards and a small radio at the New Shimbashi Building. On the front of the postcards were press photographs taken in the Fukushima evacuation zone, while on the back of the postcard were maps and directions guiding participants to a series of locations in the Shinbashi district.

  Following the navigation, the participants encountered a series of spaces, including empty offices and rooms, a plaza in front of the Tokyo Electric Power Company headquarters, a vacant lot, a derelict site, and a rooftop. At each of the locations was a three-dimensional reconstruction of the press photograph on the respective postcard. At the sites the participants were also instructed to tune the radio to certain frequencies, where they could hear excerpts from Jelinek’s text. The voices were female school students from a drama club at a high school in Iwaki, Fukushima. Listening to these incongruous voices in the Shinbashi area, the participants were transformed into tourists and photojournalists, comparing the reality of Fukushima on the postcard with the makeshift “Fukushima” recreated in Tokyo. By visiting the strangely mismatched 12 Fukushima-in-Tokyo locations, the geographical distance between Fukushima and Tokyo was disarranged and investigated.

Kein Licht – Epilog?” was re-created for the Wiener Festwochen in 2013, including a tour to the so-called “world’s safest nuclear power plant”, the decommissioned Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant which was prevented from starting by a referendum.

Kein Licht – Epilog? F/T12

2011, works

Referendum Project

A mobile theatre project archiving Japan’s post-3.11 voices

This project is a theatrical response to questions that arose from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tohoku tsunami: What are our voices and how can we hear them? The project features a refrigerated truck converted into a video installation with viewing booths and “Referendum Project” written on the outside. Visitors can enter and select DVDs to watch. Junior high school students from Tokyo and Fukushima were interviewed with the same everyday questions: What do you want the most right now? What would you do if you were prime minister? What will Fukushima/ Tokyo be like in the future? What do you understand the least right now? What is your dream?

The audience is free to watch whichever and how many DVDs they want. Afterwards, they too are asked the same questions; they write their answers on a “ballot paper” and place it in a quasiballot box. These “votes” are then published on the project website, together with the students’ interviews forming an archive of the voices of people in Japan.

The project collects the voices of students too young to participate directly in politics, and asks audiences to consider larger questions that are not simply a case of for or against. In this way, the work is a national referendum in the form of a theatre project.

In 2011, the truck and its voices first went on a tour around Tokyo and Fukushima. During the onemonth “performance” talks were held at each stopping point, inviting guest speakers to discuss postwar Japanese politics, policy-making, and culture. These talks were later published.

In 2012, the Referendum Project toured the areas in Tohoku hit by the 3.11 disaster. In spring 2014, it visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The project is ongoing, continuing to add new junior high school student interviews and audience “votes” and build up a body of post-2011 voices.

The interviews featured in “Referendum Project” have been exhibited at Art Tower Mito, Wiener Festwochen, the Schouwburg Theater in Rotterdam, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main.

Referendum Project
Referendum Project F/T11