Mud Man

2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
26:00 minutes

The film installation Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the center of local controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military. Japanese and Korean languages are mixed (a combination of unclear Japanese — Uchinaaguchi , fragments and mumbles in Korean and onomatopoeic sound effects to complement the narration), and the landscape of the two islands (Okinawa and Jeju Island) juxtaposed. The film tells the story of a community visited by bird droppings that resemble clumps of mud falling from the sky. These droppings awaken the slumbering people, who pick the clumps up to listen to voices emanating from within, and speaking of history and inheritance, nature and other communities. The work continues Yamashiro’s interest in employing flesh and earth as metaphors to personify the political body of Okinawa. It is a film hard to forget, addressing historical memory and layers contained in a territory in an original way; it deals metaphorically with the complexity of history, but also physically, with a final montage mixing war reminiscences and beatbox rhythms.

Chikako Yamashiro engages with political and social histoires of Okinawa to create haunting works drawing on oral accounts. Her work reveals lesser-known aspects of Okinawa’s contemporary reality, while questioning dominant historical accounts of Japanese and American occupation of the islands. The site of fierce battles between the US and Japan at the end of World War 2, Okinawa still has a high concentration of American military bases, occupying around 20 per cent of the land — despite the wish of many of its natives. Yamashiro’s work spans performance, filmmaking and photography, employing bodies as vehicles through which to carry stories from marginalised voices, bodies and souls from Okinawa, through uniquely poetic imaginings.

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