This work is part of Yuko Mohri’s ‘Urban Mining’ series, produced as a direct confrontation of the structures around the various forms of energy consumed by cities and their inhabitants, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Based on her research
for the series, Mohri focusses on the fact that the heads of street lamps are referred to as maguro (tuna) by electrical construction workers in Japan. Mohri draws lines of reference between electric and nuclear energy in this work: the tuna fishing vessel
hit during a US military hydrogen bomb experiment in 1954, and the implications of the radioactive tuna disposed en masse at this time; the world’s first casualty of hydrogen bombing, Aikichi Kuboyama, and the electronic music piece composed using the recitation of the poem on Kuboyama’s tombstone. What could it be, now, that the scene of discarded street lamp heads – ‘tuna’ – evokes?
Yuko Mohri (b. 1980, Japan) is a widely exhibited installation artist who recasts reconfigured objects into self-contained ‘ecosystems’. She is the 2015 recipient of the Nissan Art Award and was selected as a 2014 grantee of the Asian Cultural Council. Mohri has held artist residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Victoria & Albert Museum and Camden Arts Centre, London.
本作品是毛利悠子的「都市採礦」系列其中一部分，藉
以直視福島核災後各地的城市及其市民的各種能源消耗
習性。毛利悠子根據她的研究，發現在日本的電工術語
中，街燈頂部因其形狀與「鮪魚」相近而得名，因此成
為她的創作重心。她把電力與核能連繫在一起：引用了
日本一艘漁船因美軍在 1954 年進行氫彈試爆實驗而被擊
中的事件，大量鮪魚因輻射污染遭受棄置；事件成為史
上首位因氫彈試爆死亡的 Aikichi Kuboyama；與及啟發
自他墓碑上的詩篇而創作的電子音樂。然而，現在街上
被棄置的街燈——「鮪魚」的情境又喚起甚麼聯想呢？
裝置藝術家毛利悠子，1980 年於日本神奈川出生，擅長
將日常生活物件與機械零件重新配置組構為自給自足的
生態系統」。2014 年，毛利悠子獲亞洲文化協會頒發個
人獎，次年獲頒「日產藝術獎」。她曾參與美國曼哈頓下
城文化局、英國維多利亞伯特博物館及倫敦卡姆登藝術
中心藝術家駐場計劃。
