2015年被爆70年の節目の年の8月。 ヒロシマで個展を開催している時に訪れてくれたEmilyさんがテキストを送ってくれました。
彼女はマンハッタンプロジェクトの科学者の孫娘です。
ヒロシマや戦争のことを独自に調査する為ヒロシマに来ていたところ、個展をしていた私の作品を観てくれてインタビューを受けました。ギャラリーの中での穏やかな対話は私を次の場所(祖母の故郷の福島県川内村)に向かわせる動機ともなりました。
彼女は『呼吸する影ー被爆樹木のフォトグラムー』の作品について自身のエッセイのなかで以下のように書いてくれました。
『呼吸する影ー被爆樹木シダレヤナギー8:15 8/6 2015』
以下テキストから抜粋
... I met an artist, Shunya Asami, who makes images of trees that survived the bombing by exposing large sheets of photographic paper to the dappled light beneath their leaves. The trees are called hibaku jumoko; while 67 percent of Hiroshima’s buildings were severely damaged or destroyed, about 170 trees, ginkgos and weeping willows, camphor, cherry, and eucalyptus, survived, re-sprouting from still-living roots or sending new branches from scorched trunks. In Asami’s images, the leaves come out dreamlike, silhouetted in blue, edges dark and crisp where they held still during exposure, hazy where they moved in the wind. In English, the project translates to “Breathing Shadow of A-Bombed Trees.”
As I sat with Asami in a small, light-filled gallery surrounded by his prints, he explained that the trees offered a way to commune with the past that the official memorials did not. The A-Bomb Dome, sitting on the northern edge of the Peace Park, is perhaps the city’s most iconic monument: The palatial municipal building, almost directly below the bomb’s explosion, was severely damaged by the blast; now its skeletal ruins sit in a state of arrested deterioration, preserved to stand as a testament to the bomb’s devastation. Asami felt alienated by the monument. Time had stopped there at seventeen seconds past 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. “Living things cannot intervene or enter,” he told me. I understood how he felt. Though Hiroshima is now a thriving modern city, it is impossible to escape August 6th, 1945, as if history had begun on that day. Most of the buildings are new, as most of the city was leveled, but the ones that survived the blast are marked with signs noting their distance from the bomb’s explosion, past and present overlaid with a geography of destruction written in concentric circles radiating from the center of destruction.
In the a-bombed trees, Asami found life despite damage, the way the trunks twisted around their scars. They were marked by the past, but not frozen in it. To me, they offered a way of thinking about the life, and pain, that continue after detonation. ...
彼女のテキスト全文 https://catapult.co/stories/bombed-without-a-bang-the-nuclear-crisis-were-already-living
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