“Future Memory – Tricycle” is an artwork by Akira Fujimoto and Cannon Hersey. The work was commissioned to commemorate the realization of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) by ICAN and former Director and Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn in 2020. “Future Memory – Tricycle” was donated by ICAN to the City of Geneva and exhibited as permanent collection of the Red Cross Museum in Geneva since September 19th, 2024.

STORY

Future Memory – Tricycle, is a collaborative artwork, still life and sculpture by Akira Fujimoto and Cannon Hersey of one of the best-known artifacts on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum known as Shin’s Tricycle.

Three-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani was riding his tricycle when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. Shinichi was found by his mother near his beloved tricycle suffering from severe burns and died that night, moaning, “Water, water….”

Shinichi’s two sisters had been trapped under their house and burned to death, so his parents could not face cremating him and decided to bury him with his tricycle in their garden. 40 years later, in 1985, they decided to move Shinichi’s remains to the family gravesite and donated the tricycle to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

“This should never happen to children. Please work to create a peaceful world where children can play to their heart’s content.”

-Nobuo Tetsutani, Shinichi Tetsutani’s father

“Future Memory – Tricycle aspires to calcify an understanding of the atomic bomb survivor’s trauma and memorialize that trauma in an artwork for the time when no more survivors exist to tell the story for themselves and save us from the use of another atomic bomb as they have done for the past 79 years. My grandfather donated part of the proceeds from his Hiroshima article to the Red Cross so it is fitting for me to see my artwork in this museum.”

-Cannon Hersey, Artist

“The memories of radiation exposure have been preserved with storytelling, photographs and various ways. Future Memory offers a new experience through artworks with modern technology. We hope that people will continue to connect this experience to the future as their own memory.”

-Akira Fujimoto, Artist

“Behind every conflict, past or present, there are always personal and unique

stories that remind us of our shared humanity. The Hiroshima Tricycle is above all the story of a little boy, Shinichi, and his family. We are deeply grateful and honoured to be able to perpetuate his memory, with care and respect, through this exceptional sculpture, now permanently installed in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum at the heart of Geneva, the world centre of humanitarian action and multilateral diplomacy.”

-Pascal Hufschmid, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum’s Director General said

Future Memory – Tricycle by Hersey and Fujimoto from the Future Memory series was cast bronze at the Kunstgiesserei workshop in Switzerland, based on 3D data scanned with high resolution of Shinichi’s tricycle and made into an actual-sized sculpture. The sculpture was completed with a minimum of welding and supplementary processing, without painting to resemble the real thing. David Andermatt, a lead craftsmen at the workshop saw the hardened look of copper melted at 1,200 degrees Celsius, learned of our concept, and proposed to not add any finish but to leave it exactly as it came out of the extreme heat.

The artwork was commissioned by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and former director Beatrice Fihn in honor of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and is on permanent display at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, Switzerland.