11 March 2021
FUKUSHIMA AT 10 (organized with Sabu Kohso and 16 beaver)
PART 2

Keeping Wake, A Vigil, A Vigilance with:
(Pt.1) Ayreen Anastas, Ben Morea, Rolando Vasquez, Rene Gabri, Sabu Kohso, Yoko Hayasuke, Norihito Nakata, Angela Melitopoulos, Fulvia Carnevale (Claire Fontaine), Jason Waite (Pt.2) Sabu Kohso, Franco Bifo Berardi, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Group), MPA Jesal Kapadia, Begonia Santa-Cecila, Nick Mirzoeff, Silvia Federici, Iain Boal, Peter Linebaugh… and many more Friends.

Editing and sonic interventions:
Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

In March 11, 2021 we will be marking the 10th year since the onset of the disaster still unfolding in Fukushima. FUKUSHIMA marks a pivotal moment in the recent history of capitalist development. A precise moment when these developments meet their apocalyptic futurities, within one of the most ‘technologically advanced’ countries, exposing its residents and with time all life on the planet to the deteriorated common and shared premises of existence.

1. We come together to assert that we will refuse this war of oblivion which forces or enjoins us to Forget Fukushima. This war is not by chance. It is and has been the pre-condition time and again to restart not only the race for more deadly forms of military technologies, but also their transferal into so-called civilian life and consumer society as a way of normalizing their developments.

2. Fukushima reminds us that this production or war of oblivion, which in this case is not a biological or organic process, but rather an engineered and a fabricated one, is one of the most pernicious forces confronting life today. It restricts perception of realities which are precisely those whose perceptions could force us to have to change everything.

3. But what those who fabricate such processes of oblivion do not realize is that the subterranean forces unleashed by such suppressed events continue to act on all the parties. In order for a lie to become real, the traces, whatever could remind us of this forgotten, disappeared, has to continually be destroyed, erased, falsified. This is the unending work of denialism. Not only Fukushima has to be forgotten, not only its continued effects have to be diminished, but everyone has to be enlisted into a reality that now must become complicit with this falsification and fabrication of falsification.

4. This silent, subterranean process of the suppressed which becomes repressed, of the social, the political realities of our past, is what continues to act, in its multi fold ways, on our existence and is one of the under-appreciated political forces of what is called contemporary life.

5. Fukushima is an emblem of an event of such magnitude that it requires wholesale rethinking of the techno-scientific paradigm which dominates and orients the conduct of life today. It includes the instrumentalization of knowledge toward the accumulation of capital and development of military armaments. It also includes the lack of any capacity for communities to determine which tools, technologies or developments are acceptable to them and which pose a risk to their well-being, threaten their habitats as well as other life forms.

6. The breadth of questions that Fukushima raises are precisely why they must MAKE FORGET FUKUSHIMA. And that is precisely why we remain vigilant toward the events of March 11, 2011.

http://16beavergroup.org/mondays/2021/03/10/thursday-03-11-21-fukushima-at-10/

Image: detail from "The Radiant" by The Otolith Group