Kenji Yanobe, Atom Suit, and Chornobyl

Abstract

This article examines the Atom Suit Project carried out by Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe in the Chornobyl zone in 1997. Employing an ecocritical theoretical lens, I focus on the relationship between the artwork and the place of its stage—a site of a nuclear disaster—in order to better understand art’s agency in the face of the ecological emergencies caused by the nuclear industry’s impact on the planet’s environment locally and globally. In brief, the main claim of the article is this: if the Chornobyl disaster endangered the basic biological need of staying alive, the Atom Suit Project surpassed trivializing survival as an art theme and instead enacted it as an aspect of the disaster’s reality. In the main body of the article, I support this claim by detailing the project’s survival strategies ranging from radiation shielding, body mobility, and the danger detection system to evoking hope and interfering with the politics of nuclear denial. The article’s concluding section discusses the Atom Suit Project’s potential to survive into the deep future.