A Body of 48 with Taka Takigushi

My late grandmother wrote a journal about loss of her first husband by atomic bomb on 15th August 1945. She left me many memories and I wished to explore how culture, hometown, history and memory are accumulated in one’s body. The work aims to challenge to interpret the invisible yet profound one’s cultural and historical identity created over generations through movement and media images.

In 2025, my 48 years old body is here right now.
In 1977, I was born and
In 1971, my mother married my father when she was 23.
In 1948, my grandmother remarried and my mother was born.
In 1945, my grandmother was 26 years old and her first husband was 33 when he passed away.

If he didn't get killed by the bomb, my grandmother didn't remarry
my mother was not born.
and I am not here, in front of you right now.

My body is not here in front of you.

80 years after that day
this dream-like history is unlike a dream.

(A poem added to the performance written by Taka Takiguchi)

ARTIST NOTE

Eighty years later I find myself in Bangkok making work to reckon with my grandmother. Her life — and therefore mine — was shaped by wartime violence: her first husband, a police officer, died because of the war, and that loss cast a long shadow across generations.

This project tells the story of my grandmother, a 26-year-old woman from the countryside who had little awareness of the wider world she was living in. Her despair, felt even forty years after his death, made me confront the particular way war damages civilians and the quiet, lasting cost of that damage.

My intention is to use my body as a site of memory — to examine how historical events have been carried and moulded within me — and to share the legacy of sacrifice left by our ancestors. The work is an act of witnessing: tender, unsettled, and insistently present.

I would like to pay my condolences to and commemorate all deceased spirits of the wars, conflicts and genocides past and present.

No more Hiroshima
No more Nagasaki
No more wars