Somewhere between dystopian ruin and shamanic ritual, Yukinori Yanagi’s Project Godzilla 2025—The Revenant from “El Mare Pacificum” stands as a monumental, prophetic tableau. Assembled inside the cavernous halls of Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, the installation is an immense sculptural ecosystem built from the waste of our contemporary world: boats, cars, steel frames, barrels, furniture, broken appliances, and countless discarded materials that once defined human utility and luxury.

Bathed in an ominous red glow, the work does not merely depict a world in collapse; it summons forth a spectral presence, a revenant of our own making. As its title suggests, this is Godzilla reimagined—not merely a monster of cinema, but an allegory of humanity’s excesses, fears, and ecological sins returning to haunt us.

From nuclear silhouettes to global waste: The evolution of Godzilla

Godzilla first roared onto screens in 1954 as an avatar of nuclear anxiety in postwar Japan, a city-leveling creature born from radioactive contamination. Yukinori Yanagi, one of Japan’s most incisive contemporary artists, recasts this myth for the Anthropocene. His Godzilla is no longer just the monstrous offspring of atomic experimentation; it is the ghostly embodiment of humanity’s waste culture.

In Project Godzilla 2025, the creature emerges not from nuclear testing alone, but from mountains of abandoned objects—the skeletal remains of our economic boom cycles and throwaway culture.

The installation’s reference to “El Mare Pacificum” recalls Yanagi’s 1997 Venice Biennale piece, where he invoked the ocean as a mirror of migration, exchange, and contamination. Now, the sea becomes both a cradle and a grave for human detritus, a vast, indifferent witness to our excess.

Material as message

Yanagi has long worked with ephemeral or seemingly insignificant materials: ants, flags, sand, discarded items. In this project, the materiality is aggressively monumental. Cars are stacked like fossilized vertebrae, boats are lodged awkwardly against shipping containers, barrels threaten to topple into the viewer’s space.

The use of industrial refuse and household debris signals more than just environmental critique. It offers a visceral map of our collective psyche. The objects we produce, consume, and discard are not just items—they are physical manifestations of our desires, anxieties, and blind faith in endless progress.

The acrylic dome at the heart of the installation contains a video projection, a luminous eye or surveillance lens watching over the pile. This glowing orb acts as a symbolic nucleus, suggesting a Godzilla-like consciousness coalescing from our environmental wreckage.

Apocalypse in the Anthropocene

Standing before the installation, one feels an overwhelming sense of scale and threat. The fiery red light that suffuses the work amplifies a sense of catastrophe—an apocalyptic sublime. Yet, unlike a traditional ruin, this pile is not romantic or nostalgic. It is too contemporary, too recognizable, too urgent.

Yanagi’s vision resonates deeply with the concept of the Anthropocene: an epoch defined by human geological impact. We are no longer mere participants in nature; we have become planetary-scale agents, capable of altering climate, erasing species, and generating landscapes of trash that outlive us.

Project Godzilla 2025 is not simply a depiction of disaster. It is a testament to a turning point, a reflection of a world teetering between collapse and transformation.

The revenant: Ghosts of consumption

Yanagi’s use of the word “revenant” in the title is crucial. Derived from the French verb revenir (“to return”), a revenant is a spirit that comes back, often to haunt the living. In this work, Godzilla is the revenant born of our disregard: a collective shadow emerging from the depths of our consumption.

This revenant is not purely monstrous—it is also deeply tragic. It is our alter ego, our unconscious guilt given form. It reminds us that no matter how we try to bury our waste—physically or psychologically—it will return.

The revenant here speaks to a wider posthuman philosophy, suggesting that in a future where human agency diminishes, it is our residues—plastic islands, radiation, carbon emissions—that continue to shape the biosphere.

An immersive emotional landscape

Yanagi’s installation is designed not only to be seen but to be experienced viscerally. The oppressive scale of the piled objects dwarfs visitors, evoking feelings of vulnerability and helplessness.

The lighting, reminiscent of emergency flares or burning oil fields, casts shadows that move like phantoms. This interplay of light and object collapses the boundaries between art and environment, between viewer and viewed.

Auditory elements in the video projection add another layer. The sounds—mechanical groans, distant waves, industrial hums—create a dystopian symphony. It’s as if the sculpture itself is breathing, groaning under the weight of its own existence.

A global commentary

Though born from Japanese cultural memory, Project Godzilla 2025 is decidedly global. The shipping containers, labeled with names of international logistics companies, remind us of the interconnectedness of our consumption habits.

Our throwaway electronics, fast fashion, single-use plastics—all move through these supply chains before being dumped in distant landfills or oceans. Yanagi shows that the consequences of our consumer culture are borderless.

Furthermore, the use of cars and boats points to the twin engines of modernity: mobility and expansion. These machines, once symbols of freedom and progress, lie crumpled and obsolete here, marking a post-humanist critique of anthropocentric triumphalism.

The performative element

Yanagi’s installation is also performative in a subtle sense. Over the course of the exhibition, the space evolves, as lighting changes and projections shift, suggesting an organism in flux.

Visitors become participants in this performance, navigating around and under the sculptural wreckage. Their movements echo our societal dance with catastrophe: tentative, uncertain, and often complicit.

Art as ritual, art as warning

For centuries, art has functioned as ritual, a way for societies to process fear, loss, and hope. Yanagi’s installation performs this function with devastating clarity. It stages a ritual confrontation with the specter of ecological collapse.

Yet within the red glow and monstrous silhouette, there is also a fragile possibility of transformation. Godzilla’s original myth always contained a tragic ambiguity: both destroyer and force of natural rebirth. Yanagi extends this duality, implying that from this ruin, another kind of future might germinate—if we dare to imagine it.

The aesthetics of ruin and rebirth

There is an undeniable aesthetic allure to Project Godzilla 2025. The wreckage gleams under the red lights; the twisted metal takes on sculptural elegance. This tension—between beauty and horror, attraction and repulsion—is central to the work’s emotional power.

Viewers may feel a disquieting pleasure, an almost voyeuristic attraction to the chaos. Yanagi plays on this tension, forcing us to question our complicity: why do we find ruin so hypnotic? What does it reveal about our cultural imagination?

Rewriting the future

By projecting an imagined 2025, Yanagi asks us to consider the very near future as both an inevitability and a choice. The year 2025 is close enough to feel immediate, not abstract. It suggests that we stand on the brink, with just enough time to change course—if we act.

The installation thus functions as a speculative fiction in sculptural form. It invites viewers to step into a narrative that is still being written and to consider their role within it.

A global audience

Installed at Pirelli HangarBicocca—an institution known for monumental, immersive installations—Yanagi’s work finds the perfect stage. The cavernous space becomes an echo chamber for global anxieties, a cathedral of collective reckoning.

Visitors from across the world converge here, bringing diverse interpretations. A Milanese visitor might read the wreckage through the lens of fashion’s waste; a Tokyo-based viewer might see nuclear echoes; a visitor from the Pacific islands may connect it to ocean pollution and climate displacement.

Impression

Yukinori Yanagi’s Project Godzilla 2025 is an elegy, a prophecy, and a mirror. It is an elegy for a planet drowning in its own refuse, a prophecy of the monstrous futures we summon, and a mirror reflecting our deepest contradictions.

But perhaps, amid the wreckage and red shadows, it is also a ritual of possibility. By confronting the revenant—by naming it, shaping it, illuminating it—we might find a path beyond catastrophe.

Yanagi offers no easy solutions, no optimistic escape hatch. Instead, he gives us the gift of clarity, the raw material for collective imagination.

As we leave the installation, the glowing eye of the acrylic dome lingers in our minds. It watches us depart, a silent reminder that the revenant is not merely an external threat. It is within us, around us, woven into every discarded object and every unchecked desire.

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