Yishay Garbasz Yishay Garbasz: Ritual and Reality

New York Times Mar 05, 2014

It was almost three years ago, on March 11, 2011, that a tsunami hit the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, causing the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Afterward, about 80,000 people living closest to the plant were evacuated, leaving a toxic no man’s land. This is the subject of Yishay Garbasz’s videos and photographs, which she made during a three-week tour of the so-called “exclusion zone” in 2013.

Ms. Garbasz’s five eerily matter-of-fact videos depict intersections in abandoned towns and a country road with the power plant visible in the distance. Each is a single nine-to-12-minute take. Only blinking overhead traffic lights, the swaying of windblown shrubbery and an occasional passing truck tell you that these are actually moving images. The incessant beeping you hear is the sound of Ms. Garbasz’s personal Geiger counter registering ambient radiation.

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