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Paper short abstract:

The presentation argues that Yamashiro Chikako’s recent film, Chinbin Western, presents a subversive decolonial perspective on Okinawan struggles for reclaiming indigeneity and socioenvironmental justice through a parodic champurû opera and an ecofeminist reclaiming of female spiritual agency.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation argues that Yamashiro Chikako’s recent film Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family (2019) provides a subversive decolonial perspective on Okinawan and (implicitly) on transpacific indigeneities (see Dvorak 2020, Iwama 2021). While the film presents a series of easily recognizable articulations of indigenous Ryûkyû culture – ryûka (Okinawan songs and poetry), a play in uchinaaguchi (Northern Okinawan language) inspired by traditional performing arts – it also evokes Native American practices of dialogue with past, present, and future ancestors (Whyte 2021).

The theatrical, parodic representation of the bar where young women in faux “western” attire service locals working in the extraction and construction business evokes the lampooning of the violent masculinist ethos of Hollywood westerns in Spaghetti Western comedies and musicals (Macdonald 2021, Hughes 2010). At the same time this sequence, like the scenes featuring anti-base demonstrations and the quarry near Motobu port where materials for the construction of the "replacement" Henoko base are extracted, also points to the violence, dispossession, and the devastating socioenvironmental impact of US military and Japanese statist colonialism in Okinawa (see Iwama 2021, Akibayashi 2022, Mori 2022). Building on the recent work of postcolonial, decolonial, ecofeminist and indigenous environmental justice scholars, the presentation will show that, while the coloniality of “war as a form of life” and “toxicity as a form of life” (i.e. militarized global capitalism, Anthropocene as war on life and the planet, normalized toxicity) (Grove 2019, Mathur 2022) is designed to produce populations and ecologies “available to be poisoned” (Mathur 2022), it can also be countered by new imaginaries of indigenous resistance, resurgence, and repossession of militarized land (Chibana 2018). By way of a comedic, indigenous champurû opera and a tattooed young artist-cum-reinvented-priestess’s ambiguous ecofeminist agency, Chinbin Western suggests that such imaginaries may be found not only in the often oppressive, mundane details of everyday life but also in artistic practices aiming to generate new techniques for reclaiming indigenous sovereignty and building livable futures.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines Yamashiro Chikako’s 2009 video dealing with the memory of the Battle of Okinawa. Comparing this work to the anti-war creative practice of Shikoku Gorō, the paper reflects on the (im)possibility of passing down unspeakable war memories to younger generations through art.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation reflects on the (im)possibility of preserving and passing down to younger generations the unspeakable memory and lived experience of atrocities and crimes perpetrated during WWII through visual arts practice. To illustrate and theorize on this (im)possibility I propose a comparative study of Okinawa-born video and performance artist Yamashiro Chikako’s video piece Your Voice Come Out Through My Throat (2009) and a selection of Hiroshima-related works by Shikoku Gorō (1924-2014). Yamashiro’s single-channel video deals with the memory of the Battle of Okinawa (Okinawasen) (April 1-June 21, 1945), the last major battle of WWII. The video was produced through collaboration with an elderly Okinawan survivor of the battle whose mother and sister committed suicide to avoid capture by the invading American troops. Shikoku Gorō was a visual artist, poet, essayist, and anti-war and anti-nuclear activist who spent three and a half years after the war as a POW in a Siberian internment camp and lost his younger brother due to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. After the war he fought through his art and activism against the legacies of war and imperialism, which produced inhumane atrocities such as the Holocaust and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question of the (im)possibility of narrating or representing the memories of these tragedies in literature, film and the visual arts has been debated in countless scholarly and popular writings. Building on the reflections of Dominick LaCapra, Jacques Rancière, Lisa Yoneyama, and Yuko Shibata, I would like to explore the potential of expressing indescribable war experiences and traumatic memories in Yamashiro’s Your Voice Come Out Through My Throat and other videos as well as in Shikoku’s postwar creative practice. While the respective approach and media used by the two artists differ considerably from one another, their work at once queries and articulates in powerful ways the visual arts’ role in and capacity for passing down unspeakable war memories and traumas to younger generations and to the future.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses bodies in motion/performing bodies that appear throughout Yamashiro Chikako's works with a focus on The Body of Condonement (2012) and The Beginning of Creation: Abduction/A Child (2015), works created in underground and undersea spaces in caves in Okinawa.

Paper long abstract:

Bodies in motion appear throughout Yamashiro Chikako’s photographic, performance, video and installation art. In early works, Yamashiro herself performed along the borders between U.S. Military bases and “mokunin kosaku-chi” (tacitly approved farmlands) or in contested waters in Henoko, where the construction of a so-called replacement facility for U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma continues to this day (I Like Okinawa Sweet, 2004, Seaweed Woman, 2008). Later, fleeting images of moving figures (and voices) appear in still photos and video works such as Choros of the Melodies (2010) evoking the bodies and spirits of the dead. In more recent video installations and film works (A Woman of the Butcher Shop, 2012, Mud Man, 2016), the artist engages viewers in ways that are at once visceral and sensual, and invested in spaces of memory, reminding us that “history can only be a bodily experience” (de Bary, 2015). The affective encounters offered by these works also lead us to ask, “What is the relationship between the individual body [or bodies] and the body politic?” (Ahmed, 2000)

This paper discusses Mokunin no karada/The Body of Condonement (2012) and The Beginning of Creation: Abduction/A Child (2015), two experimental works produced between 2012 and 2015 when the artist was developing filmmaking techniques. In The Body of Condonement, haunting clusters of tangled human figures in motion are juxtaposed alongside stalactites in limestone caves, spaces linking sea and land that appear often in Yamashiro’s works “as sites of ambiguous, symbolic becoming” (artist’s statement). In The Beginning of Creation, Yamashiro’s collaboration with the dancer Kawaguchi Takao, who himself was inspired by the work of Ohno Kazuo, led her to film his movements deep in the Gyokusendo cave. Images of a mud-caked Kawaguchi writhing and crawling in the dark, are suggestive of a space/time where “humans living in historical time are also in touch with non-historical time” (Minato Chihiro, 2022). A closer reading of these works may help make clear the evolution of practices and motifs that appear in Yamashiro’s most recent single-channel video work, Chinbin Western (2019) and three-channel video and sound installation, Re-Framing (2021).