Seeing Through the In/Visible: Akagi Shūji and the Limits of ‘Environmental Restoration’

Abstract

This essay will explore the material and affective dimensions of the ongoing disaster caused by TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai’ichi reactor meltdowns from the perspective of Akagi Shūji’s photography. Mobilizing Twitter to record the uncanny traces of Fukushima city’s decontamination and recovery efforts, Akagi’s photography affords a renewed consideration of the lived struggles and unsettled realities of the ongoing disaster. Akagi’s work challenges the ideologies of recovery by recording the residual traces of the state’s decontamination process. His photographs constitute a record of bodily encounters with the visible and invisible remnants of disaster, disclosing limits within Fukushima’s ‘environmental restoration’ and its representation. I will explore how Akagi ‘traces’ the processes of physical and affective labor at work in decontamination through the specific context of the Twitter platform. I consider the ways this work operates as a place-based praxis to incite multi-layered and indefinite forms of affect, meaning, and value, elaborated through the aporia of the processes of decontamination and ‘recovery,’ thus recasting the prospects of the ‘environmental restoration’ of Fukushima in a decidedly different light. This novel practice is read as an ethical-aesthetic response that captures the ongoing disaster’s manifold dimensions as an event rife with deeply unsettled futurities.