Invasion to the immigrant
What is the right way to invade?

Gunkunjima, is a forgotten coal mining island on the Nagasaki sea. At one point the most densely populated place in the world - now it’s deserted.

This research and development project started out with the title ‘Rural invasion’, looking at ways to repopulate the deserted countryside left behind. Over time, however, another issue became more prominent, one of ‘managing memories’. When researching different areas and how immigrants can integrate, how to make a city thrive, and how to make a society tolerant, something more insidious seemed to be bumping up time and time again in my reading and travels.

Mining. A society built up in rural areas for mining. The reason for the mining, the health and environmental issues for mining, and the global standard of living that relies on mining, make it both the thing we are addicted to and the thing we cannot morally exclude from our lives.

Athazagoraphobia is the fear of being forgotten.

Athazagoraphobia is a human concern. One where we feel the need for legacy and the attachment that we came from something bigger than ourselves. In Becker’s ‘Denial of Death,’ it is the nation or religion that gives the sense of living past our death, our memories remaining in the world, and athazagoraphobia is managed for a short time. However, these processes create structures that manage memories. Our memories are colonised by different agencies and influence our thinking despite a set of values or the memory appearing false.

“The Invasion Project” looks at ways of occupying, both good and bad, and towards unearthing the real history behind the memories that have been manufactured and propagated in nation-states.