memory - project for Tanokura village

2006, photo, transparency photo, glass, Acrylic panel, wood, steel, light

Comment on “Memory - Tanokura Project”

Minako Saitoh

When I went out the door, a blizzard snow paralyzed me for a moment. I wondered how the snow piled so high. In the short time that I was talking to a grandmother inside the house, the fresh snow covered the entire ground around me.
When I was about to leave the house, the grandmother sighed and said, “Somehow, I’ve been able to make it this far.” She was hardly able to attend school as a child, worked non-stop ever since she was young, got married, raised children, and supported a big family. On my way home, I gently repeated in my mind those words that she sighed.

In the winter that year, I went from one house to the next to interview elderly women who lived in a small village in Niigata Prefecture that suffered from depopulation. The village had an unusually heavy snow that winter, which was as high as five meters. From one grandmother’s house to the next, I walked unsteadily as I kept on losing my balance on the snow.

As I interviewed the grandmothers, most of whom must have been over eighty, I began to realize that they all looked their brightest when they talked about the times of their weddings. Most of them came to the village from neighboring villages, walking over mountains and valleys to be married. They told me that half a century ago, there was a tradition for the bride to make a journey on foot to the village where she would marry the groom.

When the grandmothers talked about that day, they all looked as if they had gone back in time. As I spent time with them, I began to want to walk the same roads that they had taken to the village. Hence, in the same season that each grandmother was wedded, I walked the same roads, while also taking photos along the way to the village.

It was like following the same sights that the grandmothers had once seen through my camera lens. This project was my attempt to reproduce the scenes that they each might have seen during their own bridal journey. Alongside those photos, I placed the portrait photos from when the grandmothers were young. I also extracted passages from the stories they each told me, and adopted them into my works.

(Translated by Taeko Nanpei)

Echigo - Tsumari Art Triennial 2006, Niigata Japan