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BIOREGIONING, JAPAN, POSSIBLE FUTURES
Growth as the fermentation of culture and cultures: Kohei Saito’s ‘Slow Down’ and Kagoshima’s possible futures
Degrowth or slow growth? Bioregionalism or global systems? How Kagoshima reveals possible ‘double movements’ as Japan flickers between moonshots and moments, and how narrative settings might articulate possible pasts, presents and futures
(Ed. Context for this piece is here.)
The macguffin in 2022 film Unrueh (Unrest) is ostensibly Peter Kropotkin, and his visit to the Swiss Jura mountains in the late 19th century. Yet director Cyril Schäublin’s poised camerawork appears rather more interested in lovingly re-creating the everyday infrastructures of the Swiss watchmaking cooperatives that Kropotkin lived amidst.
Such details stays with the viewer, whether the ‘balance wheel’ of the watches that the title evokes, a steady state mechanism derived from constant flickering movements, or the multiple timezones — municipal, local, factory and church time — running simultaneously and unsynchronised in these small villages. The timezones indicate the ‘everyday complexity’ of…
