Our Remaining Breath

＜Tokyo Biennale 2020 SOCIAL DIVE Artist-in-Residence Projects＞

“Our Remaining Breath”, brings together three seemingly unrelated practices—rakugo, filmmaking, and zanshin. The project seeks to combine these practices in order to explore modalities for remembering and connecting with histories, related to Japan’s imperial war efforts, that shape present-day society. The project works with local witness testimonies, rakugo methods of storytelling (namely listening and imagination), aikido practices of connection, and video documentation.

Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, the video component of the project has been produced in Aotearoa New Zealand (where Amundsen resides). The video comprises testimonies and video footage of the Sumida RIver and its tributaries that Amundsen has collected on previous visits to Tokyo. She has edited this footage together with American military WW2 produced archival films. In addition, the video includes a voice over which reflects on the experiences being communicated in the testimony. This voiceover is performed by 中辻拓志, who is also a rakugo performer based in Aotearoa New Zealand. The video also includes the sound of synchronised breathing which was recorded during Amundsen’s aikido training. The video aims to establish a discursive yet caring space where words, memories, and histories can remain breathing in the present. In addition to the video, there are a series of workshops which will explore what it means to remember these histories now.

“Our Remaining Breath” utilises strategies of imagination, abstraction, connection, conscious presence and listening to explore how histories reside in the present. There is a focus on how to use a camera, as well as rakugo and zanshin practices to invite intergenerational connections between those who have directly experienced Japan’s war histories, and those who breath its remains into the future. “Our Remaining Breath” aims to use past narratives as a way to think of alternatives to the growing sense of nationalism that, while present in Japan, is globally reaching.

(As of March 2020)

1: “A Body that Lives” 2017, from the exhibition “A Body that Lives” at ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT, Photo by Sam Hartnett
2: Small Tree growing near Shin-Ohasi-dori, Morishita, Koto Ward, Tokyo, 06/02/2017
3: “It Was a Cave Like This” 2018, from the exhibition “A Body that Lives” at ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT, Photo by Sam Hartnett

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