Don’t Follow the Wind

Join us on e-flux Live on Wednesday, January 26 at 9am EST / 3pm CET / 11pm JST for the launch of the new book on Don’t Follow the Wind, with presentations and videos by Jodi Dean, Don’t Follow the Wind, Grand Guignol Mirai (Noi Sawaragi, Norimizu Ameya, Shuji Akagi, Fuyuki Yamakawa), Meiro Koizumi, Sven Lütticken, and Ahmet Öğüt

We are moving into the eleventh year of the ongoing planetary disaster caused by the triple meltdown of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. A catastrophe whose urgency continues due to the radioactive contamination and challenges owing to the durational nature of the invisible isotopes.

Marking this ongoing precarity, e-flux Live is hosting the book launch of Sternberg Press’s twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series, which focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The streaming launch is a compilation of fragments, images, and reflections from artists, writers, and cultural workers on their witnessing of this disaster and their critical imaginaries to counter its entropic silence. 

The book unpacks the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns.

This volume includes new texts by feminist theorist Silvia Federici, art historians Noi Sawaragi and Sven Lütticken, and political philosopher Jodi Dean that address the question: What can art do in a continuing catastrophe when destruction and contamination have made living impossible?

The exhibition is located inside the exclusion zone, an evacuated radioactive area established after the nuclear disaster that forcibly separated residents from their homes, land, and community. In cooperation with former residents, participating artists installed newly commissioned works at sites in the exclusion zone. Although the exhibition opened in March 2015, the zone is still inaccessible to the public—the exhibition, like the radiation, is virtually invisible. The exhibition can only be viewed when restrictions are lifted and people are permitted to return. This might take several years or decades—a period that could extend beyond our lifetime. While nuclear contamination has displaced and ruptured communities, new temporary and translocal formations have emerged among the residents who have lent their sites, other former residents collaborating on the project, and the artists, curators, and cultural workers.

The project was codeveloped and curated by the collective Don’t Follow the Wind, whose members include Chim↑Pom (initiators), Kenji Kubota, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jason Waite. The participating artists include Ai Weiwei, Chim↑Pom, Nikolaus Hirsch & Jorge Otero-Pailos, Meiro Koizumi, Eva & Franco Mattes, Grand Guignol Mirai, Aiko Miyanaga, Ahmet Öğüt, Trevor Paglen, Taryn Simon, Nobuaki Takekawa, and Kota Takeuchi.

Don’t Follow the Wind
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Jason Waite
Sternberg Press

Design by Zak Group

With texts by Jodi Dean, Silvia Federici, Sven Lütticken, Noi Sawaragi, and Jason Waite and contributions by Don’t Follow the Wind, Ai Weiwei, Chim↑Pom, Nikolaus Hirsch & Jorge Otero-Pailos, Meiro Koizumi, Eva & Franco Mattes, Grand Guignol Mirai, Aiko Miyanaga, Ahmet Öğüt, Trevor Paglen, Taryn Simon, Nobuaki Takekawa, and Kota Takeuchi.