Fukushima.

Photographs by Antoine d'Agata.

SUPER LABO, 2015. Japanese and English, 602 pp., 600 black-and-white illustrations, 7¼x4¾".

"The void surrounds me and eats my belly. Through the clear glass of the car window, everything is grey: slow descent into a warm and acrid cell nucleus, memory wearing off through scattered images whose logic is as atomized as the territories I go through. The method, because it takes the form of a diary whose structure is premeditated in order to challenge its own rules, ends up depending on resurgences that alter the physical space of the exclusion zone. I am being led by my own moves from fear into stillness, knowing every gesture traces an impossible path to be followed. Abandoned houses face the sea and the wind in the desert contaminated landscape. Being there, breathing cold air, memories of an outside world slowly dissolved into the crisp reality of boredom. Ghosts are like vanished gods of an extinct world. No company but fear, no hierarchy in horror, but the invisible process of alteration. Facts fulfil threatening promises, articulate a physical and mental journey that integrates the inconsistencies and aberrations of hazard: a step into the slow agony of consciousness, dark territory where verb and matter mingle into recurrent shapes. Each structure is like a dark omen, a sign of disasters to come, an unsolved enigma without a past or a future. Life fades out and leaves no space for will. Senses fall apart and break into mental ruin. The last possible form of language, obsessive sequence, manic inventory, distorted record of vain itineraries, erosion of all pretence of reason. Under the Moon, dust devours forgotten hopes, life resumes to statistics, stiff little figures face the void, armed only with ignorance. Shades of death swallowed by dawn, mould everywhere, a mouth sketches a soft embrace, in a frantic search for a past already lost. A pure sense of chaos, an obscene blend of physics and ecstasy, a vision of unleashed forces that crush civilisation into a mass of rubble and deadly lies. Silence does not make sense, instinct breathes life into the stillness of a surviving town, humanity insists on existing. The underlying principle of that frail movement is the broken desire of those who flee as far as strength allows. While the dead know in their flesh how far hell extends."

Slipcased. Limited edition of 500 with numbered and signed certificate.

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