Atsuhide Ito
Fumée, pluie noire et neige sous les tropiques
Plume, Black Rain and Snow in the Tropics
The installation deploys the use of environmental data collected during my 448.11kilometer running from Hiroshima to Nagasaki in Spring 2024. From 26th March to 5th April, I ran 448.11 kilometers over 11 days. Each day I covered approximately 40 kilometers, a little less than a marathon a day. While I was running, I carried a Geiger counter to measure a radiation level every 5 minutes and the data was automatically sent to a global radiation map. Once 1048 points of radiation data were accumulated in 5240 minutes over 11 days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The five microcontrollers send an order to servo motors in the installation in accordance to the recorded radiation levels and runs 1048 data points and repeat the same in a loop.
“Plume” in the title refers to smokes rising in any conflicts and wars.
“Black rain” refers to the piece of stained wall being displayed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The wall was stained by the black rain that fell after the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima in 1945.
“Snow in the Tropics” refers to the snow-flake like substances that fell onto the decks of a fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon 5, a Japanese boat sailed from a small town called Yaizu to the Bikini Atoll near the Marshall Islands. The snow-flake-like substances were in fact broken up pieces of coral reef that was brown up in the Thermonuclear text explosion nicknamed Castle Bravo in 1954.
The work is about turning imperceptible violence and invisible forces such as ironizing radiation to be experienced.