Is it possible to communicate with the dead?
Even if impossible in a physical sense, is it not possible to bring about a psychic space for communication, such as that created by itako[ 1] at Mount Osore [2] ?
While attentive to the distant echo of the “Psychic Room”, this exhibition is an attempt to realize such a “dialogue” through drawings and text.
The exhibition consists of texts beginning with the sentence “When I was born…” and drawings based on photographs provided by the participants. The persons who contributed the texts include students participating in “Musabiru!” and acquaintances of mine, none of whom were chosen specially. In addition, with respect to writing the texts, I decided not to limit the participants to writing personal accounts about actual events, but also to stories about the people around them or their family.
After receiving the texts, I then made drawings from the photographs. In each photo there exists a fraction of a moment in the past, encapsulated within each image. On the other hand, the act of drawing while looking at one of these photos is a time-consuming process, yielding a wholly different sensation of time. With fluctuating emotions, I made the drawings with the intention of imprinting time onto paper, nestled closely with the texts.
My thoughts ruminated around the idea of aligning the moment of time captured in each photo with the present time in which we are living. In duplicating the photos, my intention has been not to draw near to the reality of a former moment, but to draw near to the reality of the distance between the present and the time in the photos.
[1] The Japanese term for a shaman.
[2] A mountain in the center of remote Shimokita Peninsula of Aomori Prefecture, Japan. It is known for the activities of Japanese shamans.