Voice Breath Body and Pacific March
2022
Voice Breath Body is a video essay on verbal testimonies and their place in the aftermath of state and colonial violence—or, to use a more contested term, “genocide”—where so-called “reliable” evidence or official documents thereof are scant or absent. The video juxtaposes footage of endoscopy, images of lung CT scans, excerpts from Walter Ong’s and Slavoj Zizek’s work on voice and orality, documentational footage of a tape loop installation Pacific March (2022), among others, in order to reflect on the relation between literacy and orality in the limit cases of mass violence, where the veracity of verbal testimonies, as opposed to written records, is being contested.
Single-channel video with 3-channel audio
Duration: 15 min.
“Pacific March” is an English translation of Taiheiyō kōshinkyoku, a Japanese military march song composed by Fuse Hajime in 1939. I transcribed the version sung by Joseph "Kanaka/Tanaka," a Papua New Guinea native who experienced the Japanese occupation during WWII as a young boy, which was featured in Sekiguchi Noriko's 1989 documentary Senso Daughters. I then had a performer play the first verse of the transcribed melody on piano and recorded it on a 10-second cassette tape loop. The loop is wound around a stainless bucket heated at 60 degrees Celsius, the temperature for "baking" old tapes in a condition known as sticky-shed syndrome. The choice of this setup derives from the fact that Kawata Fumiko, a Japanese journalist, used over hundreds of cassette tapes for interviewing Pae Pong-gi, who had inadvertently revealed for the first time the existence of wartime "comfort women" in 1971. Although the content of the tapes were later transcribed and edited to a book version, A House with Red-tiled Roof, the tapes themselves, which contain Pae's voice, remain in Kawata's abode, most of which would probably be suffering from sticky-shed syndrom by now.
Installation with cassette tape, cassette tape player, electric stove, stainless bucket with water, and timer
Dimensions variable