/ PRESENTATION
SORRY FOR FUKUSHIMA
ESCIF
If I say “Let’s play?”
You say “Let’s play.”
If I say “Fool!”
You say “Fool.”
If I say “I don’t want to continue playing!”,
You say “I don’t want to keep playing.”
Then, I feel alone.
I say “I’m sorry”,
You say “I’m sorry.”
Are you an echo?
No, you’re everyone.
- Kaneko Misuzu -
On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima nuclear accident took place in Japan with the most terrible environmental consequences of our era. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a devastating accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. This incident had serious consequences for the environment and people’s lives, including the release of radiation, ocean pollution, displacement of people, and a great impact on agriculture and livestock. The consequences of this nuclear disaster continue to be, to this day, a concern in terms of safety and environmental management. Today, 12 years after that tragedy, Japan is dumping the radioactive water that was stored inside the plant into the Pacific Ocean. It’s time to stop and take responsibility. It is time to understand the foundations on which current societies are built in pursuit of their progress. Different scientifically supported studies address theories that relate the development of societies to the prevailing need to use energy sources as dangerous as nuclear energy. This indivisible bond of growth reveals to us that our society and its progress are founded on practices that are clearly harmful to the environment and life. Different scientific studies also relate the development of capitalist society to the acceleration of global warming and its consequences and climate imbalances.
The hyperspeed of what the powers call evolution and growth is harmful on an ecological and social level.
Stopping this drift is important. We are responsible.
We must know that although it would be difficult to anticipate that an earthquake of such magnitude would cause such a serious accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, we cannot deny that when the unfathomable and unexpected possibility of suffering meteorological disasters is combined with the existence of nuclear power plants, That is to say, with the human factor, in this sense, it is disastrous. It’s violence. But the Fukushima disaster is only the starting point to begin to assume that, in the name of the development of our systems and the evolution of our society, we are destroying the planet. We can only apologize to future generations who will receive this inheritance. We ask forgiveness for Fukushima, we ask forgiveness for forgetting the animals, we ask forgiveness for not understanding that our life comes from the forests. We apologize for the speed and for having violated the sense of progress. In this exercise of apology there is also room to rescue everything that would be good if it became world heritage, an inheritance: giving value to the gesture of a child who, with his innocence and spontaneity, brings new hope in the future but also in the now. What if all this was also an invocation? An apology and an invocation so that the tomorrow that comes brings with it another sense of the future, one more conscious, one greener, one more responsible, one more tender.
The works that Escif presents for this exhibition are drawings, sculptures and a painting. The purpose of this set of works is to generate a journey where spontaneity and innocence take power in the face of the complexity of the harmful world we have built. The gesture towards the system. This taking of space by the strokes of a child capable of generating another world, or the childish reinterpretation of some characters, contrasts with the terrible story behind it.
The exhibition apologizes and foregrounds another story, one that could be much more hopeful.
text by Teresa Juan