Asia

Akira Takayama

Happy Island - The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous

2015

Akira Takayama, Happy Island - The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous, 2015 (still)

In Akira Takayama’s work Happy Island – The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous five video screens perpendicular to the floor feature footage of cows grazing and resting in the rolling hills of farmland. Renamed ‘The Farm of Hope’ by owner Masami Yoshizawa, the property is located 14 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and is part of a now restricted area that became highly contaminated with radiation after an earthquake and tsunami caused leaks from the plant in 2011. Most of the livestock in the restricted areas have either starved to death after being abandoned by their owners or have suffered from the effects of radiation. The remaining neglected cows in Fuku (happy) Shima (island) are no longer cows, but rather radioactive waste. In an act of defiance towards authorities and generosity towards the affected animals, Yoshizawa moved back to his home inside a now desolate landscape to continue caring for his cattle despite the fact that he can no longer benefit from selling the cows. Although Yoshizawa’s cows are safe from slaughter and free from the burden of labor, they are also doomed by radiation. Caught in this bind, Takayama’s work captures these cows in a permanent limbo—left behind like the thousands of evacuees that continue to reside in temporary housing in northeast Japan after the nuclear disaster.

Akira Takayama is a Japanese theater director known for creating projects that challenge the conventional framework of theater. In 2002 he founded Port B, a network of artists, intellectuals, performers and activists working collaboratively with the aim to reimagine the discipline of theatre and its relationship to society. Far from performing to a passive audience from the safety of the stage, the collective engages directly with the public and urban spaces through site-specific installations, performances, sightseeing tours and other experimental projects, which require the audience’s participation. Whether through video interviews with residents, oral history audio recordings or Mp3 guided walking tours of specific areas, Takayama’s productions often use digital and social media as means to raise awareness and foster empathy towards various histories and marginalized groups: either the thousands displaced by a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the Muslim communities discriminated against in Japan, or the rising number of refugees and homeless struggling in Tokyo. At the core of his practice is a desire to expand on the ‘architecture of theater’ and to establish it as a new platform in society—which he calls Theater 2.0—that is able to respond to pressing social issues.

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Akira Takayama Happy Island - The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous

Akira Takayama

Happy Island - The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous