[Summer 2026]
From Trauma to Peaceful Memory
par Sophie Mangado
[EXCERPT]
In May 2012, Michel Huneault left for Japan, a country he knew nothing about. Not having been there in the wake of the “great Tohoku earthquake” (as the Japanese called it) of March 11, 2011, he had questions: “How can people live in so traumatized a landscape? How can we understand and portray the long-term impacts of such an event, the silence and the absence in all its forms? Will Tohoku be rebuilt, both physically and in our imaginations?” More than a year after the catastrophe, he joined It’s Not Just Mud, an NGO composed of Japanese and foreign volunteers devoted to rehabilitating the territory, based in Ishinomaki, a coastal city in the Miyagi prefecture, four hundred kilometres north of Tokyo. He spent two weeks devoted essentially to cleaning and reconstruction and then was asked to stay on to document the post-disaster reality. He continued to live with the volunteers in a house that had escaped the tsunami, near the shoreline. Around it stretched a desolate landscape that had once been full of dense neighbourhoods, of which only vestiges and a few houses remained. After this first stay for documentation purposes, he made several more trips there, the last one in 2024.
POST TOHOKU 2012–2024 is thus the result of visits made over a twelve-year period. The body of work is arranged in three periods and composed of some sixty photographs, three videos, and visual and sound testimonials. It shows how, over time, Huneault and the communities, respectively, opened the path to peaceful memory.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Sophie Mangado is an independent journalist. She contributes to an eclectic range of media, including the print press and documentary productions, and coordinates a collective of photographers and journalists working with marginalized people.