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The Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011 left Japan grappling with profound social, political, and environmental consequences. Yet, in its wake, art emerged as a powerful response: artists turned to collaborative and ecological practices to make sense of the crisis, challenging official narratives and responding to the slow violence of radioactive contamination. This book examines how contemporary Japanese artists-among them Chim¿Pom, Kyun-Chome, Akira Takayama, Dokuyama Bontaro, Ei Arakawa-Nash, and others-have adopted strategies of collaboration that extend beyond the human, engaging with animals, plants, and even radioactivity itself as active agents in the artistic process.
Bringing ecological thought into conversation with transcultural art history,
Nuclear Ecologies reconsiders collaboration not simply as a method of shared authorship, but as a distributed process shaped by complex networks of human and nonhuman agencies. Through close analysis of post-3.11 artworks, including site-specific projects within the Fukushima exclusion zone to participatory installations in Tokyo, the book explores how artists respond to, and are shaped by, local ecologies and the post-disaster politics of visibility and expression. Five in-depth case studies trace how artistic collaborations confront pressing post-disaster concerns: from radioactive contamination and structural inequalities to the lived realities of both human and nonhuman disaster victims.
Situating post-3.11 artistic practices within wider trajectories of socially engaged art and global art systems, challenges persistent boundaries between nature and culture, aesthetics and politics. It will be of interest to scholars and students in art history, Japanese studies, transcultural studies, environmental humanities, and those working across eco-aesthetics, posthumanism, and disaster studies.
List of contents
List of Figures. List of Tables. Preface. Acknowledgements. Author's Note 1. Introduction
2. Metabolic Ecologies: Nonhuman Collaborations and the Affective Power of Contaminated Foodstuff
3. Utopian Democracies? Collaborations in Contested Spaces of Anti-Nuclear Activism
4. Cast in (In)visibility: Collaborations and the Exclusion Zone's Ambiguity
5. Toxic Waste and "Pristine Nature": Collaborations with Nonhuman Animals
6. Exposing Continuity: Nonhuman Collaborators as Nuclear History's Witnesses
7. Taking Stock
Bibliography. Index.
About the author
Theresa Deichert is a curator at KUNSTHALLE GIESSEN, holding a PhD in Transcultural Studies from Heidelberg University and an MA in History of Art from UCL. Her research and curatorial work center on socio-political and ecological engagement in contemporary art. She has published in The Journal of Transcultural Studies, among others, and co-edited Imagining the Apocalypse (2022).
