Documentation of an on-site art exhibition response to the Fukishima nuclear disaster, which won't be seen until the area is no longer contaminated.

The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on Don't Follow the Wind, an internationally-acclaimed collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. Co-developed and curated by the Don't Follow the Wind collective (composed of Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Jason Waite, and Eva and Franco Mattes), Don't Follow the Wind explores the notion of contesting long-term environmental crises through the powerful mnemonic of an ongoing invisible exhibition, maintaining the traces of human presence amidst the contamination that forcibly displaced entire towns.

Don't Follow the Wind is an inaccessible exhibition inside of the restricted Fukushima exclusion zone, a radioactive area established in the wake of the 2011 disaster of meltdowns at the adjacent Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station that contaminated the environment, forcibly separating residents from their homes, land, and community. New commissions by artists Ai Weiwei, Meiro Koizumi, Trevor Paglen, Kota Takeuchi, Ahmet Ögüt, Taryn Simon, Nikolaus Hirsch & Jorge Otero-Pailos, Aiko Miyanaga, Nobuaki Takekawa, Grand Guignol Mirai, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Chim↑Pom were installed at sites around Fukushima lent by former residents. The exhibition opened on March 11, 2015, yet as the exclusion zone remains inaccessible to the public, it is largely invisible--a condition akin to radiation itself. It can only be viewed in the future when restrictions are lifted and the residents are able to return, but there is no clear timeline: several years or a decade--or a period that could extend beyond our lifetime.

Nikolaus Hirsch is an architect, curator, editor, and educator. He is the director of CIVA in Brussels and was the Dean of Städelschule and Director of Portikus in Frankfurt. He is the author of the books On Boundaries (2007), Institution Building (2009), Cybermohalla Hub (2012), and co-editor of the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press and co-founder of e-flux architecture.

Jason Waite is an independent curator and cultural worker focused on forms of practice producing agency, and has recently been working in sites of crisis amidst the detritus of capitalism, looking for tools and radical imaginaries for different ways of living and working together. He holds an M.A. in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths College, London and was a 2012-2013 Helen Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Oxford in the Ruskin School of Art and Christ Church.