Name: Rimacona (Natsuko Yanagimoto and Marihiko Hara)
Country Of Origin: Japan
Country Now Residing: Japan
Title: Fading Days
Confronting the death of Marihiko Hara�s grandmother, we realized that unavoidable and invisible things are awfully close to us. We could not avoid facing them through our own methods of creation.
Our work focuses on the memory left behind by the grandmother, because a picture always has a connection with death.
In the box, a frame of memory, there are objects of �once-existing� and �still-existing�. You enter �fading days�.
We place a �komori-uta� recorded in Kumamoto, Japan as a symbol of a memory of collective. This has an important reason. There were some �komori� in Japan. Now komori is like a baby-sitter in English, but once it was not. About 9 or 10 year old girls from poor villages were sold and they served as baby sitters for the wealthy. Since they had no opportunity to have an education, they could not read nor write, they had no way to express their feelings, the misery of their own unfortunate lives but through improvised songs. The Komori songs were transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation, changing their styles through time.
We had an opportunity to listen to some songs which were recorded about 30 years ago, sung by local people aged 80-90 in Kumamoto. Fortunately we were able to obtain permission to use those recordings for our works.
It is preferable to see our work �fading days� whilst hearing the sound-part. After listening to the music, return the CD-R to the box and you will return to your real life from the experience of �fading days�.
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