Motoyuki Shitamichi, Taro Yasuno, Toshiaki Ishikura, Fuminori Nousaku, Cosmo-Eggs, 2019 (installation view)

Tsunami Listening: An Analysis of ‘Cosmo-Eggs’

In response to the profound environmental turbulence following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, a visual artist, a composer, an anthropologist, and an architect collaborated on a project that would experiment with the human capacity to coexist symbiotically with the more-than-human world after Fukushima. By introducing a sensorial installation to the Japanese Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) through their combined methodologies, they introduced an ecopoetic and geophonic potential for what might be termed Tsunami Listening. This talk analyses Cosmo-Eggs as a site for such ecological attunements by turning to the remobilisation of indigenous animisms and the problematisation of machinic animisms within the environmental post-humanities and contemporary art history.