https://www.oceansasarchives.org/5-july-panels/project-four-lrgyd

“We began by talking about tidal fluctuations between Okinawa, Hong Kong and Singapore, which led us to think about our relationships to our local shorelines. Soon we found ourselves considering larger historical and political questions about access—and losing access—to the sea and land, particularly in the context of our shared affinity for demilitarization in the Pacific. The networked root systems of mangroves, with their embrace of contradictory currents, grounded our collaborative creative process.”

—James Jack & Collier Nogues

Poet Collier Nogues (Hong Kong) and artist James Jack (Japan) have engaged in a series of creative conversations over the past year together. For dokyu space Collier composed new poems using the interactive storytelling app Twine and the VR web framework A-Frame, exploring networked, tidal, and immersive poetic forms. James created new graphite drawings on paper investigating the rhizomatic structures of mangroves interwoven with text(s) that resist land-centric colonial histories by putting sea spirits, maritime ways of life and ancestral roots back into the center. They shared these works with all dokyu space participants, from which brief discussion excerpts have been selected here along with samples of their works in progress for the website in preparation for an upcoming exhibition.

https://dokyu.space/News

 

Artists online exhibit

AT HOME/ FROM YOUR SPACE

Art Tropical Okinawa

 

James JACK

Messages from the Virus

ウィルスからのメッセージ

 

14 April 

“Slow down or perish” the virus seems to be saying to us. It has messages for us. Each day from now on during the “circuit breaker” in Singapore (or “lockdown” in other places) I will find one message the virus is sending us and attempt to translate it into words.

First message:
Love each other, especially from a distance.

Tomorrow I will do the same. Listen to the virus and its carriers to see what they want to say to us. If people listen, perhaps we can improve from this situation from calamity towards one that is more in tune to our environment, each other and the society that we want to become in the future.

「ペースを落とすか、滅びるか」。ウィルスが私たちにそう言っているようだ。これは私たちに向けたメッセージなのである。シンガポールが「サーキットブレーカー」（他の土地では「ロックダウン」と呼ばれている）となるこれからの日々のなかで、私はウイルスが私たちに送ってくるメッセージから一つを選び、それらを言葉に訳していこうと思う。

最初のメッセージ：
互いに愛しあおう、特に距離があるところから。

私は明日も同じことをする。彼らが私たちに何を伝えたいのかを理解するために、ウィルスとそれが運ぶものに耳を傾ける。人々が耳を傾けることで、この状況を災難から、環境やお互い、そして未来にそうなりたい社会に合わせて、改善していくことができるかもしれない。

 

Continues here:

https://artstropicalokinawa.tumblr.com/tagged/jamesjack