Florian Goldmann's solo exhibition at Turn Another Round in Sendai, Japan.
Florian Goldmann: Promethean Leaps
29 November — 6 December, .2022
Turn Another Round, Sendai (Japan)
Promethean Leaps is part of ongoing audiovisual research on the utilization of models as means of representing, communicating, commemorating, as well as predicting catastrophic events. Catastrophe models occur as reconstructions of past, exemplifications of present or predictions of future events. They are utilized in museums to impart historical events and—in different shape—by reinsurance companies to conduct risk evaluation of insurance portfolios.
The literal ‘down-turning’ that the term ‘catastrophe’ connotes potentially collapses the established hierarchies of social order and disrupts the flow and operability of production and trade. Yet, it also bears the potential to disrupt and shift a state of inequality. Predictive catastrophe models, used in economics, governance and insurance, however, tend to idealize and thereby stabilize the status quo, on which their predictions are based.
The project poses the question of how these different types of models (the etymological root of ‘model’ being ‘measure’) are used to calculate and make measurable the incalculable and immeasurable, implicated by the term ‘catastrophe’. Further, starting from observations in Japan in the years after the Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami and the ensuing accident at the Fukushima power plant, the role that catastrophe modelling plays in the context of technical and economical development as well as its impact on the catastrophic side effects of these developments is investigated.
Juxtaposing images and voices compiled from a broad range of sources, including archival materials and recordings taken on site in Japan, Promethean Leaps draws a connection between two instances of risk conception and their respective locations:
1. The safety culture concomitant with the gradual establishment of nuclear power technology in post-war Japan that would not suffice to prevent, but rather facilitate, the accident at the Fukushima power plant in March 2011.
2. The development of Tokyo Disneyland as a realm of controlled virtual adventure and an intense accumulation of financial risk.
How do these locations’ reconstructed past and modelled virtual catastrophes inscribe themselves into the basis of their calculation, that is the physical world and the biographies of the people inhabiting it? What are potential communal strategies of defying the contingently catastrophic consequences of risk-led governance and economy?
Hazards, latently embedded in the environmental conglomerate of recurring nature phenomena and the quasi-virtual global chains of extraction, production and distribution, might be charted and monetized as risk by the insurance and corresponding catastrophe modelling industries. Yet, the knowledge obtained is largely retained as intellectual property within these companies and is rarely accessible to governments, businesses, or individual households. What has been detected and quantified in actuarial models remains uncertain for those dwelling next to hazardous industrial sites, whose exposure may well be a prerequisite factor in insurance's risk equations.
Reading these models’ visualizations and maps transversely, may reveal a community’s individual exposure to hazards that emerge from the entanglements of the infrastructures of trade and industry permeating their surroundings, perturbed by climate change-induced extreme weather events.
Florian Goldmann works in the fields of visual arts, artistic research and media theory. A major focus of his work is on the circumstances under which prominent narratives of history are established, concurrently omitting other potential narratives. He studied Sculpture, Media Art and Experimental Film in Edinburgh, Athens and in Berlin, at the University of Fine Arts. From 2014 to 2018 he was a fellow at the Research Training Centre ‘Visibility and Visualisation – Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge’ as well as the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies at Potsdam University. Working with the collective STRATAGRIDS, contributions to publications and exhibitions were developed between 2012 and 2018. Goldmann’s works were shown in group and solo exhibitions in Germany and internationally, a.o. in Russia at the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in 2017; in Japan at Nakanojo Biennial in 2019 and in Linz, Austria at Memphis Art Space in 2021.
Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe
