Kärnkraft, jordbävning, krig. Chim|pom och den relationella estetiken som kärnkraftsmotstånd

Abstract

This article analyses the Japanese art collective Chim↑pom and their interventions in contemporary and historical aspects of nuclear politics and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The study situates Chim↑pom’s artistic work in a context of a new governmentality, theoretically developed by the philosopher Brian Massumi (2009). The ”environmental” governmentality is – contrary to Michel Foucault’s (2008) concept biopolitics – not built on calculation and statistics, or securing a flourishing population, but on neoliberal economization of risk and disaster. Intertwined as a part of the environmental governmentality is the neoconservative militarization, that responds to the very same unstable processes, but with military force. These processes are ”environmental”, not because they are ecological or green, but because they act on the forces and powers of open and unstable processes, the forces that we sometimes call natural disasters or accidents. The aim of the article is to analyse Chim↑pom’s work on the Fukushima crisis and the historical traumas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the light of this new governmentality in Japan. Chim↑pom’s relational aesthetics also feeds on these open-ended and unstable of processes, however in terms of social and emotional orientations. The historical conditions that have discursively separated nuclear power as ”peaceful use of nuclear energy” from its disastrous military and warfare use is the hegemony of rational technocratic based in a modern liberal ”biopolitics”. This modernization has built on dichotomies such as that between body and mind, reason and emotion, nature and culture. Chim↑pom thematise nuclear politics from the perspective of those who has been silenced and ignored by this dichotomization, or those