Refuge Fukushima

Conversation with Mélanie Pavy and Sophie Houdart

Thursday 15 february, 2018 - 8PM

Go get lost, 2018

Mélanie Pavy

“My work revolves around a question that is both very old and eminently contemporary — the end of the human world — and the possibility of depicting it on film. It starts out with a specific future project — the building of a Japanese city, Omega, in southern India — before moving on to the fantasies and projections that this elicits. The project’s first interpretation, which appeared in Japanese newspapers after the Fukushima catastrophe, was that it will be a refuge for Japan’s elite in the event of a catastrophe capable of completely wiping out the country.”

Mélanie Pavy’s Go Get Lost ! videos (2018) are featured in the En Suspens exhibition. The artist looks back at her body of work, which is anchored in Japan after the nuclear catastrophe. She and Sophie Houdart, an anthropologist, expert on Japan and member of the "Call It Anything" collective, discuss how writing, film and investigation can give tangible forms to a shaky reality in a disjointed country.