In memory of a shard

2021

Print on Fabric
Clay Sculpture
Shard found in Sōma, Japan

Exhibited Der Tank, Basel, Switzerland

The work “In memory of a shard” captures the architectur- al and environmental change of Sōma, one of the worst hit places by the Tsunami that followed the Tōhoku Earthquake on March 11th, 2011. Before March 2011 Sōma was a neigh- bourhood of small coastal villages, now an immense part

of the area shifted to a non-human town, inhabited by a 90 hectares cluster of solar panels. The only remaining witness- es of the previous villages are the original roads that mean- der organically trough the rasterized order of the newly built solar-farm. Viewed from above the countless solar panels could also be interpreted as a graveyard’s thumb stones.
The printed fabric hanging from the wall, shows a satellite image of the solar-farm and stands in dialogue with a clay model of the town’s only surviving building, which is placed on the blank extension of the fabric. The original building was deconstructed, to build a memorial site in memory to the victims. The shard of a plate, I found on the ground next to the memorial site, is hidden in the clay model, as a gesture of building a new old home to the shard.