Abstract:  This article examines how artistic practices respond to the emergence of a “negative community” after a disaster, where people are bound together by displacement, abandonment, and infrastructural control rather than choice or solidarity. Drawing on fieldwork in coastal Japan following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident, this article reflects on how art can resist the reduction of catastrophe to either spectacle or state‐managed recovery. Through practices of observation, witnessing, and collective engagement, art creates vital spaces of proximity, care, and dissent. In doing so, it unsettles imposed forms of community and opens possibilities for imagining a new social life beyond the structures of ruin and control.

Keywords:  art after disaster; art and emergency; artistic response to catastrophe; community arts; disaster aesthetics; ethics of witnessing; negative commons; negative community; post‐disaster art; trauma and representation

Published:   23 October 2025

Issue:   Vol 2 (2025): Seeing Oceans: How Artistic Research Contributes to New Ways of Looking at Ocean Life (In Progress)