Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani

Sayonara Hashima

HD, colour, stereo, 17 min., 2009

"Sayonara Hashima" takes as its subject Hashima, an island off the coast of Japan with a fascinating history. Entirely manmade, the concrete island served as a coal-mining operation that, at its peak of operation, housed some 5000 inhabitants, at the time the most densely populated place on earth. Abandoned in 1974, when its mineral resources had been exhausted, the island has since taken on a ghostly, mythic status in the national imagination, aided by its appearance in a Battle Royale II, a recent Japanese science fiction film. Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani explore the changing roles of the island throughout its history, capturing the accounts not only of former inhabitants but also the current impressions of high school students of a place they know only indirectly through representations. As with many of Fischer & el Sani’s previous projects, Sayonara Hashima asks how memory operates, how a site wears its history, both physically and metaphorically.

Movie
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Sayonara Hashima
HD, colour, stereo, 17 min., 2009
(excerpt 1.55 min.)