This project is about the mass hysteria following the Pearl Harbour Attack, and how it impacted on people with Japanese ancestry residing mostly on the Pacific coast, after Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over 120,000 people were sent to 10 internment camps across the United States, and MAKIKO recently discovered that her great, great uncle was one of them.
The work is mainly focused on what happened in the Tule Lake camp, the first camp in which he was interned. The research takes in archive materials, interviews and visits, as well as considering the internees’ strengths based on solidarity, and how they thrived between 1942 - 1945 and into the post-war period.
The concepts and themes at the heart of this project are highly relevant to what is going on in the world currently: emigrating to find a dream in a foreign country, dealing with a change in society due to conflict/war, struggling to establish identity, to find community, belief or religion, etc.
History repeats.
She has been working to create the cross-media visuals, combining photography, archive images, collages, painting (with dyed mud pigment powder and acrylic paint) and moving-film still-image clips. The paint work is inspired by Gerhard Richter, tutored by Peter Kennard.
This project will be showcased at RCA2024 in June 2024. Her exhibition includes a black and white photography (shown on project page), a mixed media work (right), a KYUGORO (dummy) book (right middle) and an original hymnal MAKIKO inherited from Kyugoro's family, a performance of reading poems from "Legends from Camp" and "Before the War" written by renowned Lawson Inada, a poet laureate and her relative in the US and jazz which was one of the elements in Inada's style.
This project is selected to be a finalist for Carte Blanche of Paris Photo 2024.
