Otsuchi Future Memories

Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 –together with the nuclear disaster that came along with it -, was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached 40 meters above sea level, traveling up to 10 km inland.

The fishing town of Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, was probably the most destroyed by the tsunami. There, roughly ten percent of the population was killed or went missing and sixty percent of residential buildings sustained damaged. The Mayor at the time and many municipzled, leaving Otsuchi's administrative functions paralyzed. In the midst of such chaos and disorder, people started to recover the family photographs they found in the debris of city, trying to keep safe the memory of Otsuchi.

This project presents a visual documentation of destruction and loss, by connecting portraits of the Otsuchi survivors with family photographs recovered from the waters, swept away by the tsunami. The survivors of Otsuchi were portrayed in the spaces where their former homes and workplaces were located. The importance of the colors becomes crucial in this approach. The colors from the destroyed photographs - deformed and blurred images, altered by the effects of the salty water, sometimes creating new colors or mixing the former ones - are revalued on an exercise of color archeology, where each of the colors found in the destroyed photographs were used to colorize the portraits of the survivors.

The tsunami caused considerable material damage, killing people and destroying entire communities, but above all, the survivors also face the intangible loss of their own memories and identities, in which family photographs play a fundamental role.