June describes her creative process as an act of constant unfolding. ‘Everything you’re meant to be is already within you from the day you are born, it is your convictions, your experiences, your relationships, which unfold themselves.’ In death, we cease to exist physically, but through creation each of us opens a universe of wisdom tied to our ancestors as well as the scars which come with it. It was through dance that her spirit spoke most freely, and although she was formally trained as a dancer, she always felt a dancer’s first ‘unlearned movements were the most raw, visceral expression of the human spirit’. A once-rigid and formal craft, dance became her language of liberation, a voice to speak to a silenced generation. ‘It began with what I called the drip dance, a really silly name. Initially, I wanted to make a dance about the stars, but my body kept drooping, almost sinking into the floor. My heart was heavy with visions of soldiers marching, the watch towers, sleeping in the horse stables, walking through the snow. We were like cattle herded into stables, onto trains, into desert prison camps.’ These visions laid the foundation for her first piece on the internment, Herding , the first of the nine iterations that followed, each unfolding, re-shaping and embracing the ghostly memories of internment that spoke from within. Just as June’s gaman channelled through her dance, this same energy guides me as I draw. As I create marks, my mind finds a similar state of intuitive unfolding. Sitting on the land, I receive its presence through breath — and release it through gesture on the page. Whether it’s the ephemera of light, wind or sound, the shift of currents or the dance of the phragmites, the choreography of charcoal and ink are my way to uncover, receive and respond to the dance of the ghosts that lie beneath the surface. As I reflect on June’s work, I can see how gaman has taken root in my own life. The story of the Japanese American
Incarceration spans generations, from my great-grandfather’s haikus, to my grandmother’s dances, to my own sketches in the fields of phragmites. In this lineage, I can draw relationships between my cultural identity, the landscapes I move through and the creative practices that empower me. I grew up in a generation shaped by the shadows of the Japanese incarceration. As a child I pursued assimilation, the normality of whiteness so I would not stand out. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, I remember the swell of fear, hysteria and violence that overtook the nation. Today, when I read about militarised raids in immigrant communities, ICE detention centres, mass deportations, Black Lives Matter protests and die-ins for Palestine, I am invariably reminded of the ghosts of the Japanese Incarceration. My gaman is rooted in the deserts of Heart Mountain, where beneath the watchtowers, my ancestors cultivated spaces of joy, cultural pride and adoration amidst desert prison landscapes. It is rooted in June Watanabe, my grandmother, whose courage to dance for a silenced generation showed me the reality of systems which act to silence diversity, as well as the beauty from those who defend and embrace it. It is rooted in my meander through the phragmites, where amidst the culms of a species marked for eradication, I found the beauty of an immigrant story, the resilience of marginalised identities and a future of climate-resilient communities. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I see a reflection of my own path as a designer A witness learning to receive the histories that lie beneath the surface of the land A maker working to stand for, speak to, and bring them to light True repair is not a bandage that hides the pain or smooths over the past It is a process that lets the wound speak And only by learning to dance with our ghosts—can we begin to truly begin to heal £
COREY WATANABE is an artist, writer and landscape architect in Massachusetts, often tasked with finding solutions to revitalise, remediate and repair the land. He asks what does it mean to acknowledge a wound that may never and maybe never should be fully healed? We lay down a cap of soil and a façade of corten in hopes that we may cover ecological violence of the past, but just as heavy metal contamination has seeped deep into our soils, the forces of colonisation, capitalism and extraction have left
Yoshio Okumoto, photographer
a deep scar on the land and our collective human experience.
Corey Watanabe
31 on site review 47 :: standing still
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