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).