On March 11, 2011, a devastating earthquake hit Japan. The earthquake and the tsunami that followed would cause one of the world's worst nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station owned by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company). Vast amounts of radioactivity were released into the environment, 100,000 or more people who lived in the area evacuated many of whom remain displaced to this day.

Spurred on by the nuclear catastrophe and its impact on every aspect of the lives of the region's displaced inhabitants, the curatorial collective consisting of Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jason Waite planned a courageous political and artistic gesture. In March 2015, they mobilized 12 artists (among them Ai Weiwei, Meiro Koizumi, Trevor Paglen and Taryn Simon) and asked them to develop new commissions inside the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone— hosted in empty buildings lent by former residents where there is an eerie silence of a place totally devoid of any human presence. Intensely political, the action remains inaccessible, unviewed and unvisited. Now, multiplied in Fukushima's disturbing emptiness, its power is to be transferred to Greece and to the 4th Fast Forward Festival at the OCC.Taking as its starting point the common condition of displacement, Don't Follow the Wind will set up a Non-Visitor Centre in a building in central Athens which was boarded up in 2011, forced to close by the then-recent economic crisis, and has remained empty ever since.

The collective has once again mobilized a group of artists, this time to create original works which have a bearing on the situation in Greece while simultaneously engaging with the inaccessible exhibition in Fukushima's radioactive zone. At the same time, a 360° film on the projects in headsets made by three generations of a family that lives in Fukushima's polluted area, just outside the exclusion zone.

The Athens installation will include a forum for the forcibly displaced, bringing together all those who have been forced to abandon their homes by environmental pollution, economic crises, or conflict. The forum will provide a platform for the exchange of experiences and tools borne of displacement, and for the drawing up of an expression of mutual assistance and a shared vision for a radically different future.