Interview with Rui Sasaki

Yun:When I was reading your artist statement, your experience of losing memories by virtue of changing locations caught my attention. When you crossed the world to come to the United States from Japan, you said that you experienced sensations of lost memories and nostalgia. I remember that when I arrived in the U.S., I had very raw feelings about myself as a person lacking context in a new society. It might have been because the contexts of political issues like race and gender were different, but beyond that there were aesthetical differences that I could feel in my skin. I could feel a sensory difference in the way I became mute, deaf, and by becoming animal. I believe that "being animal" is not the same as being "other." Being animal is about becoming a complete unity. I did not feel isolated from others, but recognized my body as a sensory organ. It meant being a different species than what I had been. You mentioned that home is a container of memories and nostalgia. I agree with this because I did not have this kind of opening of senses when I moved to France with my family for a year. I was a tourist that had a place and past to go back to. A tour can be a good "memory." We remember all the great moments using the convergence processes of our brains. As for the sensory experiences that occur by shifting location, the senses do not converge on one spot. It is a completely open experience in which the skin dominates the brain as a principal organ, as the events happen on the surface of the body. When we do not have a past or future, we only have the present events on our skin. I think your way of using your body as a field of event is an intriguing artistic practice. 

As I was studying site-specific work and planning this project, I could not resist the idea that the mind belongs not only to the body itself, but also to the location that the body belongs to. My project slowly shifted towards understanding mind movements through the body more than the traditional understanding of site-specific work, which is what drew me to your work. You already mentioned many interesting ideas about body and location, but can you discuss further how you understand the body and memory through your work?

Yun: How can you define you? By tracing? How can you define the mind? We realize our memories are not as powerful as we believe. We can lose them by accident. We might find some people who easily lost their intimacy with their family by losing memories. Your country doesn't have the same meaning for you after you spend several years in a different nation. But as the movie Ghost in the Shell shows, memory might be one of the defining elements of a person. Are you a different person than before? Or do you need to be different?

As for your second question “Your country doesn't have the same meaning for you …Are you a different person than before?” I think that this is strongly related to my spatial sense. I believe that my memory itself is never changed but my sense, especially for a space, is always fluid. For example, everything in the U.S. is bigger than in Japan. Therefore, my unconscious sense has been altered since I moved to the U.S. Memory is never changed but the feeling of nostalgia is shifted. I feel that everything is small and narrow when I am back in Japan. So, I am confused because I know that here, Japan, is my home. However, the nostalgia is just physical memory. Psychological memory stays forever in my mind. 

Yun: Let’s talk more about a memory. I think there are two types of memory attitudes in your work. The first one happens as an object by the presence of your body or/and as a living sense on your body; and the second is a memory that you had, barely hold on to. In the project, Silence (2007), a sound from your mouth doesn’t have  value as  language and an utterance is lost. So the shape of your mouth to make a specific sound in Japanese became a casted object, like the casting for dead sounds as a language. In Erase (2007), your fingerprint on the window, a way of knowing who you are, turned out to remove your past/memory/identity of the invisibility. And in Listen to My Mom (dust record) (2008), you seem to be trying to turn the dust that you obtained from the house in Japan into a volatile memory by creating a disk. What kinds of sounds were those? Was it for sharing your memories, or for vaporizing the memory you had?

Rui: As for Listen to My Mom (2008), the sounds are surprisingly rhythmic. A needle on a turntable catches each particle of dust and makes rhythm. It is quietly calm and sounds like background music that you can often hear in movies when something starts happening. The sounds constantly change because the dust from Japan mixes in the air and other dust from viewers and the installation space accumulates on the record.  In general, dust is mutable and ephemeral. For me, dust is not representative with volatilization. Dust is more stable and permanent. Dust has all the physical elements of my parents’ house in Japan. I wanted to go back to Japan but I could not at that time. So, I was eager to move everything from my house to the U.S. It is impossible, as you know. I believe that dust from Japan contains everything from there. And, it is portable. I can move it to the U.S. in my bag. Moreover, in science, dust is the smallest particle and never changes character as itself. Memories are more psychological issues, as when you said “memory” in your question. I do not use dust as memory. I used dust in the work as physical material. I could not be satisfied with just feeling something through my memories. I really needed to touch something as physical. That was “DUST” for me.  

09/15/2011