text: Carsten Theumer

The medal Lost home – Fukushima, 2011

News of the most severe seaquake measured to date off the north coast of Japan on 11 March 2011 was followed by images of apocalyptic proportion. Footage shot from a helicopter showed the tsunami’s colossal wave sweeping away and burying beneath itself anything and everything in its path. Entire towns and villages – houses, factories, farms – were destroyed and swept away by a force so tremendous it is hard to imagine. The footage showed panicked drivers fleeing before the wave in their cars, disoriented; people climbing onto their rooftops in a futile attempt to save themselves, with no chance of survival – images that burned themselves onto our brains.
Just one day later, news of the natural disaster was followed by something even less conceivable: the wave had flooded and damaged the nuclear power plant in Fukushima; memories of Chernobyl were immediately at the forefront of our minds. The back of the medal illustrates the further dimensions of this theme. On the one hand, core meltdown, chain reactions, nuclear radiation. The very thing that was supposed to be a restricted process taking its course, unhindered. Life is destroyed or changes erratically by mutation, as symbolised by the two-headed creature. And yet: when we take a look at the atomic dimension, we find similarities to the macrocosm, to our universe. Life as we know it would not have been possible without the collapse of huge stars and many other coincidences which scientists – especially astronomers – are decoding, piece by piece.