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3512 JP, Utrecht
Following the 2011 nuclear disaster, Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong photographed the changing landscapes in the closed zones around Fukushima over a period of five years. They documented evacuated farmhouses, gardens, agricultural fields, and the surrounding hills and forests and interviewed former inhabitants of the area.
In ‘Tree and Soil’ they combine their own landscape photography with historical material from the collection of naturalist and explorer Philipp Franz von Siebold. His collections—now in the possession of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands—illustrate how Japanese culture is deeply rooted in and inspired by nature. Siebold perfectly represents the mindset that became typical for the Age of Exploration, in which explorers started to travel the globe to uncover the secrets of the natural world and all its treasures for the benefit of humankind. This era can be seen as a prequel to the Anthropocene, in which our planet has been profoundly changed by human activity.
"At times it felt as if we had ended up in a distant future, like archaeologists trying to figure out what kind of mysterious force had caused everybody to leave the area."
- Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong
