Cindy Mochizuki’s dawn to dust presented a multi-media installation comprising of audio, animations, video and sculpture. The animations were displayed inside architectural, cinematic viewing spaces inspired by the memories of Mochizuki’s father and his sibling of an abandoned shack house - one of the post-war "homes" that her father's family inhabited following the release of Japanese Canadians from the internment camps of B.C. in 1949. During this time, Japanese Canadians went through a second uprooting designed as the final solution to the so-called Japanese problem in Canada. Two policies were announced: 'dispersal' and 'repatriation' - her family took 'repatriation' (return to Japan). Mochizuki’s father’s family, along with another 4000 Japanese Canadians, were sent to a country with poor economic and living conditions due to the war; a country they had never known and where they would still feel quite alienated.
The installation presented several pieces including a single-channel video work, a five-channel audio piece, a miniature facade of an abandoned shack house in Fukuoka, Japan and several animations experienced through five individual smaller-scale viewing spaces and other forms of projection. The animations were seen and told through the cinematic eye of 5 fictional characters (a house snake, a meijiro bird, a shepherd dog, a ghost, and a stone statue) - each inhabiting an aspect of the lived space and surrounding land (rice patty field, pathway, garden, forest, well, trees). Together their viewpoints attempted to 'make sense’ of the mysterious disappearance of a family as they one-by-one vacate the home. What remained is a family recollection of childhood, as Canadian-born children trying to survive and make sense of everyday life in a foreign country. The five characters/perspectives grappled and attempted to figure out what it is they witnessed as simply a strange disappearance of both home and the people who came to inhabit it.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, drawings and community-engaged projects. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its complex relationships to site-specificity, the transpacific, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. Her artistic process moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, performativity, chance, and improvisation. She has worked extensively on a large body of work that is informed by and within Japanese Canadian communities in B.C and Japan. In these projects she works with members of these communities and often includes her paternal family’s history both within the internment camps and their experiences as repatriated Japanese Canadians in Japan in the post war.
She has exhibited, performed and screened her work in Canada, US, Australia, and Asia. Exhibitions include the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, Washington), Yonago City Museum (Yonago, Japan), The New Gallery (Calgary), Hamilton Artists Inc (Hamilton), and Koganecho Bazaar (Yokohama). She has performed as part of 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), Richmond World Festival with Cinevolution Media Arts Society (Richmond) and has worked with numerous collaborators from other disciplines including Theatre Replacement, Dreamwalker Dance Company, and Project In Situ. Her community-engaged projects including Magic School (Daisen Laboratory, Japan), Things on the Shoreline (Access Artist Run Centre) 2016 and Shako Club (grunt gallery) 2015. In 2015, she received the Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts (2006).
For more information about Mochizuki’s work, please visit her website.
Places of Memory // Interpretive essay by Toby Lawrence
“Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”
~ Pierre Nova, 1989.
Oscillating between poetic intention and full disclosure, Cindy Mochizuki assembles instances of engagement with her family’s history and their memories of their homes and lives in Oouchi in Shizuoka and Shida-machi Fukuoka-ken, Japan after being expatriated from Canada in 1946. Following the end of the second World War and their release from internment camps in Sandon, Bayfarm, Popoff, and Slocan, B.C. where they spent four years, Mochizuki’s grandparents with six children were given two choices and, along with nearly 10,000 other Japanese Canadians, opted for ‘repatriation’ rather than ‘relocation.’
Through interviews with her father, four aunts, and one uncle, and her own site research, Mochizuki locates the actions of memory within dawn to dust. The conflation of history and memory, that would otherwise distinguish (biased) fact from experiential subjectivity, unfolds in the re-articulation of key characters from the siblings’ stories in Ghost, Statue, Snake, Dog, and Bird, and through their collective and individual descriptions in Lines to Remember. This active recollecting represented through their aging hands–solo or together–lends itself to the ways in which stories are rebuilt within our bodies, through forgetting and remembering. The application of stop-motion animation to bring life to the characters constructed out of clay, porcelain, and paintings in Ghost, Statue, Snake, Dog, and Bird alludes to the fantastical tone that frequently dominated the interviews. The memories of characters and events build from the Mochizuki children’s experiences as Canadian citizens living in the country of their ancestors, but not of their home—devastated by war. The “visual stories” told by the siblings, are, in many ways, like the animations, “handmade.”
The bookwork accompanying the adjacent projection, Lines to Remember, functions as another articulation of remembering and of the actions undertaken by Mochizuki in her own process of gathering stories and understanding her family’s histories. This layering additionally offers a bridge to the animated sculptures on the other side of the central wall, wherein each character represents a point of recollection abstracted from the trauma of dispossession and systemic prejudice. Through the exploration of storytelling as memory, dawn to dust moves beyond scripted behaviours and parameters of enacting and processing personal and collective histories.