Eiko Otake

Acclaimed artist Eiko Otake has made five trips to Fukushima in the wake of the 2011 nuclear disaster. Collaborating with William Johnston, a photographer and scholar of Japanese history, Otake’s multidisciplinary project transforms the irradiated landscape into a site for performance. The artist’s movements—in empty train stations, overgrown roads, tsunami-damaged buildings, along broken seawalls, and amidst makeshift memorials—dwell in the residue of life before the meltdown while also charting the passage of time in these inhabitable lands. A Body in Fukushima is culled from tens of thousands of photographs, whose mournful but resolute march creates a “letter to the future.” “My body will carry a piece of Fukushima,” writes the artist, “I hope the [viewer’s] sense of their own distance to Fukushima might also change.”

This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and the body memories each willingly carries. In January 2020, New York-based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen, during the Cultural Revolution in China. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate. The surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko’s visit and the pandemic made Wen’s visit to the USA impossible, but not the collaboration. Looking back on the video diaries they shot without a script, Eiko and Wen continued their dialogue on Zoom, sharing past works that form a deeper understanding of their circumstantial differences and characteristic similarities.

Filmed on the Colorado College campus. Explores the relationship of performer to place.