Aernout Mik

Aernout Mik’s film Cardboard Walls, 2013, shows the aftermath of Fukushima’s nuclear disaster that occurred in 2011. With what is left of their belongings, the victims in the film are forced to live in a barrack that is provisionally compartmentalized by cardboard walls. Transformed into a small replica of the video scene, the gallery space integrates the viewer in a labyrinth of such walls, with some chairs dispersed throughout the space. The work is silent, and is shown on two screens hovering in the middle of the room. When the visitor sits down, the walls almost hit eye level, sparking an immediate connection to the victims onscreen. There, too, people sit in their cardboard compartments, peering over their walls or reading a book, playing card games or taking a nap. The activities are strikingly unspectacular. But boredom gradually turns into collective frustration and control disintegrates when, in a domino-like effect, people start pushing down the fragile cardboard, turning their initial apathy into a force that literally cannot be contained. This exchange of power plays out in a reciprocal pattern and is further enhanced when the Tokyo Electric Power Company staff, who are held accountable for the disaster, pay a visit to apologize. At first, they stand tall among the exhausted refugees, but soon enough they crawl, continuously bow, and even cry when listening to their stories. It becomes harder and harder to tell who is the perpetrator and who is the victim here.

As is often the case in Mik’s films, there is an obscure distinction between the scripted and the unscripted. The postapocalyptic reality in Cardboard Walls evokes new connections that both release unexpected powers and reveal hidden shortcomings. If anything, it is the group’s dynamic that guides these events. Because just when you think you’ve figured out the emergence and disappearance of these processes, the plausibility of situations is put to the test again.