"Aprés Hiroshima"

Performance at Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark

Japanese paper in 3 sizes
blanket with sun patten
5 glass vases
incense and holders
text

I am folding papercranes in japanese traditional paper.
After I have folded the birds, I burn them and put them in
glass vases to symbolize all the people that burned to death
in Hiroshima the 6th of August 1945. The glass vases are
decorated with black cherryblossoms "sakura" covered in ash.

The theme of the exhibition, "Machinepower" was to celebrate
the year of industrialization in Denmark. The nuclear bomb,
was the most fatal and grand invention of the industrial age.
With references to Alan Resnais´ new wave film: "Hiroshima
mon amour", I dissolve the rules time and place, and re-enact
the collective memory of Sadako, a 10 year old japanese girl
who died of cancer caused by the radioactive bomb, and now
a symbol of the catastrophe at Hiroshima.
There is no love story like in Resnais´film, no suffering, no
documentation, no gaze or perspective, no tension or pity,
only the action of folding and burning, a cycle or meditative
ritual.

“Aprés Hiroshima"

8.15 AM in the morning 6th of august 1945, Hiroshima saw the first
nuclear bomb ever.

A melted watch in a glass montre in the museum of the Peacepark show
the exact time.
The melted watch was found beside a bottle.

But the man, the man with the watch around his arm and a bottle of sake in
his hand, was gone. Burnt to ashes.

The nuclear bomb was released five hundred meters over its target,
and developed over a million degrees in the center of the explosion.

A second later, a nightmare of fire came out of the sky.
In a radius of 280 meters and a heat of 5000 degrees.

Everything alive died. Everything able to burn was burning, glass melted.
Most houses where made of wood, and disappeared completely.
200.000 innocent people died together, in the middle of what they
had been doing, in a split second.

One second .

Just on the other side of the river, are the remaning constructions of
one of the few buildings that did not fully dissapear.
These days it is called "The A-bomb Dome" and was december 1996
declared Unesco World Heritage.
The bulding used to be the beautiful Industrial Promotion Hall until the
bomb exploded almost above it and effectively stopped all future promotional activities.

Today, the nuclearbombs that can be made are more than three thousand
times stronger than the bomb that was thrown over Hiroshima.

Sadako.

When Sadako was 10 years old, she developed cancer, caused by the
effects of the nuclear bomb.
She decided to fold 1000 papercranes of paper, that for a long time have
been the symbol of a long and happy life in Japanese tradition.
She was convinced, that if she could achieve this goal, she would survive
and be healthy again.
She died when she had made crane number 664, but the children in her
school folded together the last 336, and she was buried with all 1000
papercranes.

To this day, people in Japan fold papercranes and take them to the
monument for Sadako, where thousands and thousands of papercranes
forever keeps alive the memory of Hiroshima and its people.