2021
single channel video with sound
Filming Location : Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (ACAC), Aomori Hotoke-ga-ura seashore, The Submerged Forest in Dekijima seashore, Spring Water of Gudari Swamp Higashi Hakkouda Tashiro Highlands, Hokkaido Horonobe Underground Research Center

Supported by Aomori Contemporary Art Centre(ACAC), istyle Art and Sports Foundation, Squeaky Wheel’ s Workspace Residency

Sound for Chapter 1 : ‘Echo Fantasy I’ (Composed by Eva-Maria Houben, Performed by Ensemble Ordinary Affects)

This work is based on performance workshops filmed during the fall 2019 residency at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center (ACAC), as well as footage shot at various locations in Aomori Prefecture and at the Horonobe Underground Research Center in Horonobe, Hokkaido, which conducts research and development on geological disposal technology for high-level radioactive waste. The structural video work Spring Water, Faults, and the Body is a performance piece.

This video consists of two parts. Superimposed onto the first part is the voice of the artist reading aloud the memoirs of her scientist father, who used to be involved in the field of nuclear energy engineering.
Utamura recounts how the “I” in the memoir grew up among animals and nature, how he became fascinated with the phenomena of the natural world, and how he chose nuclear energy as his specialty amid the turbulence of Japan’ s period of rapid economic growth. In contemporary society, all issues are intricately intertwined with each other. Within this work, representations of human beings, nature, and animals are equivalent substitutes for each other. “I,” the father, is represented as a tree, while the family, a unit connected by blood, is linked to other species on this Earth. The temporal axis of human life is superimposed on the Earth’ s temporal axis, which encompasses the 4.5 billion years since it came into being.

The scene of a goat giving birth that “I” saw as a child is superimposed onto the geological strata of the buried forest from the last glacial age in Dekijima, Aomori Prefecture, where coniferous trees from about 28,000 years ago are preserved in the strata. The scene where the goat finishes giving birth and eats up the placenta is superimposed onto images of strata of reddish-brown cyanobacteria in a buried forest trickling with raindrops. Cyanobacteria were the first to photosynthesize and deliver oxygen to the Earth 3 to 2.5 billion years ago.

The tree as the “I” of the memoir is represented by silver ribbons flowing from the branches of the tree that represent light and invisible wind currents. In the memoir, these silver ribbons might represent the trends of the times, or instruments of experimentation. In the final scene in the sky overhead in the first part, the artist walks on a mixture of ice and water that could break at any moment, and encounters a tree with silver ribbons fluttering in her direction, ending the first part.
The scene of the spring water in Gudari Swamp in Tashirotai, where melted snow from Hakkōda in Aomori gushes out, represents an emission of the memories of life that have continued from our human ancestors, a recurrence of the subject — circulating water released by tracing the path of a fault plane created by fluctuations in the Earth’ s crust.

The work is recounted through the actions of the artist, who became a mother during its creation, as she reads aloud the childhood memoirs of her father.
The difference between the voice of the speaker and the subject of the story naturally raises the question of the history of gender differences.
This reading aloud is an act of performance that imagines new subjects, including non-humans, in order to transcend the concept of the “individual” brought about by modernity.
The second part takes place underground, where research is being conducted at the Horonobe Underground Research Center, becoming a space-time where the past and future intersect, with no humans as subjects. The subjects of the story are multiple “others,” such as machines, technology, and geological formations. The only language involved is the English subtitles: the voices of the speakers disappear. The “fault” in the subtitle “Who is at fault?” is used with the double meaning of both a geological fault, and responsibility.

The second part features vitrified nuclear waste to be disposed of in a geological formation. Glass is a material used in vitrification, a technology for solidifying nuclear fission products (high-level radioactive liquid waste) together with glass materials.
The glass materials of the future, which store the energy waste that has sustained our civilization, will be disposed of after passing through nuclear power plants and reprocessing plants, hidden in deep geological strata. The fault planes of the strata distorted by human mining operations move with the howling of the Earth. They also provoke earthquakes caused by human activities that may occur in the future.