Installation (Installation)

In Over There, Bontaro Dokuyama conducted a series of workshops with various people who had been forced to relocate in temporary housing after the Fukushima accident. Participants in the workshop made masks from local newspaper cuttings, included in the installation as well as videos showing these different persons wearing their masks, pointing in the direction of their hometowns, where they can no longer return. Over There portrays those displaced from Fukushima due to the 2011 nuclear disaster, underlining the subjectivity of each person in opposition to the way they are usually considered within the Japanese society or by the media, calling them “victims from the disaster.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This film refers directly and fictionally to one of the first media dramas: the burning of the Zeppelin aircraft LZ 129 Hindenburg as it landed in New York in 1937. The power of these images, which were widely diffused in the press, had a profound haunting impact on people’s consciousness. This mode of transport – both futuristic and obsolete – crystallizes a collective imaginary which was fed by cinematic, literary and mythological fiction as Barthes would put it.