FIDMarseille x FRAC Sud

FIDMarseille is partnering with FRAC Sud - Cité de l’art contemporain to offer four exceptional events from March 14 to 16, echoing the exhibition The Ecology of Relationships - The Forest is the Sea’s Lover (February 7 to November 15, 2026).

A brief guide to relational ecologies in contaminated territory. Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist, director of research at the CNRS and researcher at the IFRJ (French Institute for Research on Japan). With a focus on science and technology, Japan has been the main subject of her research for 20 years.

We are in Tōwa, about 50 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In the years following the nuclear accident of March 2011, the people who remained in the area had to learn what it means to coexist with levels of radioactivity. They underwent an intense experience - one that unsettles and disarticulates things, dislocates them and recomposes their qualities and properties. It seems never-ending. The inquiries they conduct, in the discomfort of never being certain of anything and in the anxiety of constant reversals, weave new relational worlds that struggle to stabilize.

Event in partnership with Opera Mundi.

Discover five films echoing the exhibition.

CÔTÉ JARDIN
Pierre Creton
France, 2011, 4’

It is March 2011: here, the garden, the end of winter and the pleasure of plunging one’s hands into the soil, of touching the plants, preparing for the arrival of spring; over there, death, sky and sea contaminated for a long time, untouchable.

JAPAN SYNDROME - MITO VERSION
Tadasu Takamine
Japan, 2012, 48’ 

This video work is part of the Japan Syndrome series, in which Tadasu Takamine has a group of actors reenact, within a deliberately pared-down stage setting, the discussions and tensions inherent in the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster. Drawing on real conversations recorded with shop employees in Kyoto, Yamaguchi and Mito, each reenactment stages questions about the origin of food products and their potential health risks. Beyond the apparent simplicity of the device, broader issues emerge: the radiation monitoring system, governmental responsibility, and the weakening of an entire region—particularly in the Mito version, a city closer to Fukushima. Through a striking economy of means, Japan Syndrome reveals the invisible effects of possible radiation, impossible to measure with complete accuracy, yet undeniably permeating everyday life - prompting both individual and collective awareness. Born in Japan in 1968, Tadasu Takamine is both a theatre director and an artist. He develops an experimental theatrical practice in close dialogue with local participants, focusing on socially engaged and political issues.

THE ANATOMY CLASSROOM
Hikaru Fujii
Japan, 2020, 36’

The Anatomy Classroom is part of a long-term artistic project developed by Hikaru Fujii, artist and filmmaker, taking as its starting point the Futaba Museum of History and Folklore. Located four kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the town was completely evacuated following the nuclear disaster, then designated a “difficult-to-return zone” before its gradual reopening. In order to prevent contamination, the museum’s collection - dioramas, traditional objects, tools, taxidermied animals, and so on—was progressively removed from the area by a group of citizens. Organized without government support, these residents and the museum’s former director undertook to preserve these objects as material witnesses to their local and environmental history.

In a series of video works, Fujii documented these relocations over several years, while simultaneously organizing site visits and discursive gatherings, addressing questions of memory, transmission, and representation. The Anatomy Classroom emerged from one of these dialogues, held at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. On that occasion, several members of the collective Call it anything, composed of artists and social science researchers, shared their experience of visiting the museum and questioned the conditions under which a catastrophe can be represented—and by whom.

TENZO
Katsuya Tomita
Japan, 2019, 59’
FID 2019

In a Zen temple, “Tenzo” refers to the person in charge of meals. It is one of the six prestigious roles in the monastery, also associated with teaching other decisive aspects of the doctrine. By giving his film this title, Katsuya Tomita places cooking, care, hospitality, attentiveness to others and the question of community at the heart of his project.

4 BÂTIMENTS FACE À LA MER
Philippe Rouy
France, 2012, 47’
FID 2012

In presence of Philippe Rouy.

Three months after the disaster that occurred in Fukushima in March 2011, TEPCO, the operator of the nuclear power plant, installed a live camera on the site. These images, with dates and times visibly ticking by, are accessible online. They would become, through a bold challenge taken up by Philippe Rouy, the sole visual material for 4 Buildings, Facing the Sea.

This exhibition brings together Japanese artists from several generations around the emotional, ecological and memorial ties that connect us to our living environments. Inspired by the triple disaster of 11 March 2011 in Japan, it explores artistic practices that emerged in the “post-Fukushima” years, shaped by the country’s history and rapid modernisation.

Designed to resonate with the architecture of the Frac Sud, conceived by Kengo Kuma, the scenography creates a dialogue between works that bear witness to the shifting relationships between humans, environments and ecosystems. The subtitle, borrowed from an ecological fable by Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, evokes a vision of the world in which every living thing contributes to a common balance.