The Radiant

Presented at dOCUMENTA 13, The Radiant is a flux of images, electric sound, words, music, noises, silences. Starting with the tragic events that rocked Japan in March 2011, the film follows a circular path that crosses different dimensions of time. The primary narration, centered around the Fukushima disaster, is interspliced with multi-source and archival materials, including film, video and performance segments which, according to the collective’s consolidated creative methodology, present themselves autonomously and in connection with each other, opening onto a plurality of specular discourses. Directors and producers, the Otolith Group also curated the sound, which acts plastically on the images and the spectator’s perception. According to the authors, “The Radiant invokes the historical promise of nuclear energy and summons the future threat of radiation that converge upon the benighted present. Under these conditions, the illuminated cities and evacuated villages of Japan can be understood as a laboratory for the global nuclear regime that exposes its citizens to the necropolitics of radiation”. In this perspective, the film places itself within the context of a project on global nuclear energy politics begun by the group in 2012 during a residency and a public program at the Blood Mountain Foundation in Budapest.