Erin Siddall

Fukushima Half-Life, film stills, 16mm film transferred to video, colour, sound, 14 minutes, 2013. 

Installation images from Vancouver Art Gallery BOMBHEAD exhibition, 2018. 

In Fukushima Half-Life the words of the artist’s personal experience work as an authorial inscription, testimony, or confessional, entering the frame and assuming and challenging its own veracity and authenticity. Recorded on 16mm, the film is concerned with arbitrary divisions between clean and unclean, safe and unsafe, as demarcated in the no-entry and suggested no-entry zone outside of the nuclear disaster in Japan. Filmed for 5 days in May 2011 following the earthquake and nuclear disaster, Fukushima Half-life explores what kind of ordinary life might go on in an interstitial place, a place that is neither inside or outside, but both simultaneously. Diagetic sound in Japanese includes radio broadcasts, location recordings, and conversations between the filmmaker, residents, officials, and volunteers.