In “Kiatsu” / “Air Pressure” and in “Zawawa,” Rupert Cox, Kozo Hiramatsu and I have worked together in interdisciplinary explorations of the impact of aircraft on those caught below their overflights.
“Kiatsu” / “Air Pressure” was a Welcome Trust-funded project focusing on the last farming family resisting the occupation of their land in the construction of Narita Airport, Japan, becoming an album and booklet for Gruenrekorder, an installation at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, part of the Asia Triennial and at the PLACE festival Aldeburgh, the inspiration for various writings (including a blog) and a film which toured extensively (and earned an ‘Honorable Mention’, South East Asian Anthropology Award).
“Zawawa” is a Toyota Research (Art) Grant-funded project learning from the experiences of those living on Okinawa, site of the last major battle of World War II, occupied by the US from then until the Fukki reversion of 1972 and continuing as a host to considerable military infrastructure. Hiramatsu, Cox and I have written several texts but our main focus so far has been “Zawawa,” a 50 minute film, which ‘pacifies’ US archive footage by re-scoring it with the sounds of island craft activity and which mixes wide framed landscapes with close shots of textured surfaces (coral, snakeskin, agitated water, typhoon blasted bark, cave walls). Directly involved have been Junko Konishi (Okinawa Prefectural University of the Arts), Atsushi Nishimura (Okinawa National College of Technology) and translator Asako Murakami, as have the fourteen local interviewees whose testimonies have inspired our work.
A new 2024 work in the Listening for Traces exhibition at Rizq Art Initiative (RAi) in Abu Dhabi relates to Zawawa. Listening for Traces was curated by Cathy Lane and features artists showing works resonating with sound, conflict, memory: Abdullah Al Othman (KSA), Asma Ghanem (Palestine), Alexia Webster (South Africa), Christopher Marianetti (USA), Jananne Al Ani (UK / Iraq), Louise K Wilson (UK), Martin John Callanan (UK), Nour Sokhon (Lebanon), Open Group (Ukraine), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Thomas Gardner (UK), Uzma Falak (Kashmir, India) and Yara Mekawei (Egypt).
More information in the news feed.
Zawawa – a book by Kozo Hiramatsu, Rupert Cox and me – published by Archive Books in 2025 as part of our ongoing research.
The book is a bilingual Eng/JP presentation with fantastic translations by Asako Murakami. Included are longer discussions with Katsu Kabira and Seijin Yogi – who both survived the horrors of the WWII Battle of Okinawa – and shorter excerpts from our interviews with other ear witnesses such as Setsuko Ikehara, Masakazu Kudaka, Shoichi Chibana, Yoriko Ganeko, Toshihisa Tsuha, Ritsuzen Yamanoha, Yoshiaki Higa, Yoshitaka Ikehara and Tomotsu Tokeshi.
Ethnomusicologist Junko Konishi and Nicholas Friedman (Curator of Ornithology at Leibniz Institute) each provide wonderful contextualising articles and Rupert, Kozo and myself offer extended reflections on our collaboration, on the layered historical backgrounds to the Ryukyuan conflicts and on the process of making our film, which is featured as stills and in transcripts of audience reactions (not always positive!). There are a series of Rupert’s photographs of cloud formations – in part a reference to a sequence of US military footage of the sky we found in the Okinawa Prefectural Archives in Haebaru – and there are some of my field notes as well as Junko’s images of the Shuri Castle blaze and a diagram of Kozo’s 1990s research on effects of noise from US military bases.
Rupert Cox’s and my film “Cave Mouth and Giant Voice” (2015) was also shown as part of 2025 Leiden Essay Film Festival. The film, shown in a 5.1 surround mix, is inspired by the Okinawan war memories of Yogi-san (whose testimony also features in our Zawawa (2025) book and in the film of that name (2018).
