Rebuild Fukushima

A full five years after the nuclear disaster in March 2011, the Japanese province of Fukushima still looks like a modern-day Pompeii. Traffic lights flip from red to green in this spectral zone, but nobody is there to cross the road. Reconstruction has begun around the nuclear facility, and urban planners and archaeologists are not the only ones involved. Dagmar van Wersch and Bert Hana are working on it too, from their laptop on the other side of the world. Van Wersch is a photographer (without a camera) and Hana is a Google Street View expert, and they are using Street View to scan Fukushima. Inspired by postcards of iconic buildings that can be folded to create miniature scale models, they use the images they find to create construction kits of the original houses. Combining this tangible component with audio tracks of former inhabitants,  conveys the impact of the disaster on an individual level: what it means to be unable to return home. Van Wersch and Hana have done all the preparatory work. Now it’s your turn to rack your brains and get building – helping Fukushima to rise like a phoenix from the radioactive ashes.