FFF4 | Don't Follow the Wind

On March 11, 2011, a devastating earthquake hit Japan. The earthquake and the tsunami that followed would cause one of the world's worst nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station owned by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company). Vast amounts of radioactivity were released into the environment, 100,000 or more people who lived in the area evacuated many of whom remain displaced to this day.

Spurred on by the nuclear catastrophe and its impact on every aspect of the lives of the region's displaced inhabitants, the curatorial collective consisting of Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jason Waite planned a courageous political and artistic gesture. In March 2015, they mobilized 12 artists (among them Ai Weiwei, Meiro Koizumi, Trevor Paglen and Taryn Simon) and asked them to develop new commissions inside the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone— hosted in empty buildings lent by former residents where there is an eerie silence of a place totally devoid of any human presence. Intensely political, the action remains inaccessible, unviewed and unvisited. Now, multiplied in Fukushima's disturbing emptiness, its power is to be transferred to Greece and to the 4th Fast Forward Festival at the Onassis Stegi.

Taking as its starting point the common condition of displacement, "Don't Follow the Wind" will set up a Non-Visitor Centre in a building in central Athens which was boarded up in 2011, forced to close by the then-recent economic crisis, and has remained empty ever since. The collective has once again mobilized a group of artists, this time to create original works which have a bearing on the situation in Greece while simultaneously engaging with the inaccessible exhibition in Fukushima's radioactive zone. At the same time, a 360° film on the projects in headsets made by three generations of a family that lives in Fukushima's polluted area, just outside the exclusion zone.

A Forcibly Displaced Forum brings together former residents of Fukushima, refugees, and Greeks displaced by the economic crisis to find an affinity between seemingly unconnected contexts forming a new geography of solidarity. Over a picnic taking place in the hotel Forum members share their diverse experiences and collaboratively decide on a message for future migrants to write in dust. In the face of an increasing precarity which knows no borders, the shared knowledge of those presently displaced collectively map the prospectives of a different future.