Ever since man became sedentary, he has tried to subdue nature.

In the Christian world of faith he can even feel he is on a divine mission, the dominium terrae, the dominion over the earth, is a significant motif in the Old Testament.

The exegesis of this motif has changed over the millennia and today sees rulership that is more protective than one that is only aimed at the exploitation of resources, but he still wants to exercise control, man.

Not that nature is still unleashed.

Christian Riethmuller

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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A striking example of nature controlled by human hands are bonsai, those miniature plants in East Asian garden art that are formed by means of growth limitation and wiring and are therefore controlled in their strength without negating their power.

Especially in Japan, bonsai art is linked to the idea that the whole is contained in the small, so the manageable universe of miniature plants reflects the much larger real world of nature.

The photographer and filmmaker Norbert Schoerner, who comes from Bavaria but has lived in London for more than 30 years, regularly travels to Japan, where his "Fukushima Project" was created, which is currently being exhibited under the title "The Nature of Nature" in the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt can be seen.

The project combines photographs, short films and soundscapes, presented in a hanging and spatial design specified by Schoerner, which is based on Japanese architecture and its aesthetics with partition walls and folding screens.



Schoerner is also the designer of his large-format photographs, which only appear at first glance to be landscape photographs or detailed studies of pine trees rising in a barren mountain landscape in front of a dramatic sky full of dark clouds.

On closer inspection, however, one sees that the trunks of the trees are not rooted in the earth at all, but stand in a container in which bonsai are typically grown.

And indeed, it is miniature plants bred by the Abe family, garden artists for three generations in the Azuma region near Fukushima, that Schoerner placed in front of large-format landscape photographs from the region and illuminated and photographed in such a way that one might think they were Trees should have reached their full growth and all the fine wires and strings



In his project, however, Schoerner is not concerned with a romantically inspired relationship with nature or a photographic hugging of trees.

As the project name suggests, it was created in the Fukushima area, that is, the region where nature was truly unleashed on March 11, 2011 and an earthquake caused a tsunami and then a nuclear disaster when the nuclear power plant there was severely damaged was damaged.

The consequences of this failed attempt by humans to use nature for their own ends are virulent to this day.

Schoerner used the green of a night vision camera to depict the omnipresent radiation in the exclusion zone around the power plant.

Animals can be seen to a soundtrack by Ferdinand Grätz, who, among other things, sampled sounds from the exclusion zone - cattle,

At the end of the impressive show, there are two pictures that don't really fit in with the photographic diptychs and triptychs in the previous rooms.

They show a fenced property on which black plastic garbage bags are stacked.

A landfill?

Yes, but a very special one.

The sacks contain contaminated topsoil that was collected after the nuclear disaster around Fukushima.

But what to do with it?

Nobody knows, because nobody can control such forces of nature.

The exhibition “The nature of nature.

Fukushima Project” can be seen at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Schaumainkai 17, until September 18th.