Kobe earthquake of January 1995, nearly twenty tons of rubble - fragments of materials and remains of the destruction - were specially transported from Kobe - and exhibited in the Pavilion. Twenty-two of Miyamoto Ryūji’s photographs of Kobe after the earthquake were printed up into 5 x 1.2-meter murals that covered the walls, enclosing the space. In an interview on the exhibition, Miyamoto confessed, “I didn’t want it to be pretty. I just wanted to line the photos up on the wall. […] The photos are themselves ruins on paper.” Thus, the edges of some the murals were ripped or burnt to imitate the aesthetic of the ruin. Miyamoto preserved the murals that he created for Fractures, and when he exhibits them, for example at the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, “Japan-ness: Architecture and Urbanism in Japan since 1945” (2017), he continues to emphasize the decaying materiality of the work. 3.11 TSUNAMI 2011 In 2011 and 2012, Miyamoto produced a documentary film titled 3.11 TSUNAMI 2011 that he co-authored with three survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 2011. In this case, Miyamoto elected not to photograph the ruins of Tōhoku (Northeast Japan). Instead he shifted his focus from the architectural and infrastructural effects of disaster to the human experience of it. Miyamoto claimed that he “didn't know how to photograph” Kobe after the earthquake, but he still persisted in attempting to come to some understanding of the events that had occurred there. In the wake of 3/11, not only did he not know how to photograph the Tōhoku region; he found himself unable to do so. The film is made up of three parts. Each section begins with approximately 15-minutes of completely unedited footage of the tsunami followed by a 15-minute interview with the survivor who filmed it. Miyamoto’s reserved and indirect approach to the events of 3/11 articulates a more nuanced understanding of the knowability of traumatic experiences. Taking the “obscenity of understanding” as a given, Miyamoto resorted to the “act of transmitting,” rather than documenting, one component of the triple disaster of 3/11. He also refuses to qualify this film as "art". Exhibitions (selection) 2018 Catastrophe and the Power of Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan Tokyoscape: Into the City, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan 2017 Japan-ness, Center Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France 2013 “Making as Living” The Exhibition of Great East Japan