Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Eunsil Shin
Could piles of radioactive soil bags be considered a ‘gift’ for future generations? In 2011, Japan was devastated by a ‘triple-disaster’ which included an earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown of anuclear powerplant in the Fukushima prefecture; the remnants of the nuclear disaster, in particular, continue to haunt the area. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Japan between 2018 and 2019 in the ‘ruins’ of the disaster, this paper explores how the futurity of the triple disaster is imagined through piles of contaminated soil bags in Fukushima. In following the contaminated soil bags which contain unfiltered radioactive isotopes and have unimaginably long lifespans, I consider the notion of an ‘accursed share’ (Bataille 1991 [1949]) to ask how the semi-permanent characteristics of nuclear matters shape and re-shape geographic and temporal horizons regarding ecological inheritance.
In so doing, the paper aims to catalyse discussions on ‘the gift’ beyond the reciprocal relationship between the giver and receiver by highlighting the nature of radioactivity as visceral yet imperceptible. Radioactivity creates an ‘unwanted and ineluctable’ intimacy between past, present, and future generations and has become integrated into the landscape as a signifier of the uncertain future of Fukushima. Through these entanglements of the invisible and uncertain, I ask how the ‘undesignated receivers’ of nuclear waste could be included in a ‘mutant ecology’ (Masco 2004) and ‘ecological ruin’ (Tsing 2015) which require new modes of living in an ecologically and socio-politically compromised world.
I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Prior to Helsinki, I completed an MSc and PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Japan, I explored in my PhD thesis people’s efforts to rebuild a sense of everyday life in the ruins of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. My research revolves around a shared sense of crisis that emerged in East Asia in the context of the Cold War, nuclear matters, toxicity, and issues surrounding environmental inheritance. Alongside this research, I have also translated into Korean two books by anthropologist Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A particular history of the senses (2019) and Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2024).