The atomic bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 marked unequivocally the end of the Second World War. Such an incredibly brutal act of force broke definitively Japan’s resistance, and showed everyone else that the U.S. were the commanding superpower at the time. Russia watched concernedly and rushed to get its own nuclear weapons, preparing for the “Cold War” with U.S. in the following years.
In an attempt to give account of this destructive episode (and of the historical plots that lead to it), I created an immersive audiovisual installation for the “Potsdamer Konferenz” Exhibition in Schloss Cecilienhof, Potsdam.
The installation consists of a floor-projected film, set in the middle of the room on a worn-out concrete pedestal, which goes over the chain of events that led to the atomic detonation in Hiroshima. Around the pedestal, different media play in synchronization with the film: a monitor with interviews of contemporary witnesses, a big lightbox showing a photo of the city after the bombing, and a second projector that comes specifically in activity only at the moment of the explosion. A four-point sound system provides the matching soundtrack to the installation.
The assignment was to use almost only images and sounds, no words and titles, in order to make the installation comprehensible to all visitors without subtitles or translations. I chose to concentrate on the bomb itself, almost letting the bomb narrating its own course, through the first phases in Los Alamos, as it was being created, to the last seconds in the sky over Hiroshima.
One thing that stroke me while researching for the film is that the bomb had indeed a kind of irreversible path: from the second it was sketched on paper, it somehow “had to be used”, as if even the main players (U.S. president Henry Truman for example) could not interfere in this unstoppable progress toward violence.
The 4m long concrete slab was an “objet-trouvé”. It was actually part of the old kitchen appliances of the castle, but when we visited the rooms for the first time we were surprised from its appearance, an object unrelated with anything else and looking like a relic. To me it looked fascinating, more like a monolith or even a kind of altar, and instead of hiding it I decided to promote it to main scenographical prop for the installation. The fact that the visitor had to look down to see the video, allowed for interesting “views” in the film, like the one from the B-29 bomber above Hiroshima, that was recreated by Yokanima.
The more historical part of the film was done through archive films, researched and trimmed in order to give the iconic visual clues of the steps towards the final drop. But from the moment the bomb detonates, the installation goes much more abstract. Atomic explosion footage is showed, but the brutality and the destruction are then presented on a more abstract level. At a certain point, it is almost as if the staging of these events is happening in our mind, a shock that must happen in our consciousness.
CREDITS
Concept, Direction, Editing, Sound: Michele Pedrazzi
3D Animation: Yokanima
Part of the exhibition “Potsdamer Konferenz – Die Neuordnung der Welt”, curated by the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Braneburg
