Is a Film a Bone?

Is a Film a Bone (2020) is a memorial and is part of a ritual. It is the bone that I could not locate. It is about the many dead we won’t let be forgotten, about what we do when we survive but others don't; when it could have been us but just by luck it wasn't; and how to live after devastating loss and violent assault.
It is about the embers that still burn on our skin and with which we are lighting new fires. Our fires are connected, our oceans are one.

This film is about how to do right by the dead. About the battles on the ground, in the skies, in the domains of memory and language. About how to live with fire and its role in midwifing the new world. It is about the labour of mourning, about how to do right by the dead, about the battles to reclaim the past and re-appropriate the future. It is about the hidden wormholes connecting the different space-times I am entangled in.

It is about how to live with fire, and its role in midwifing a new world.

Shot in Hiroshima, Okinawa, and "New York City" on Munsee Lenape territory.

https://vimeo.com/456308393/377b9c093f

  • Nine Chiyoko Yamamoto-Masson
    Director
  • Nine Chiyoko Yamamoto-Masson
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Other
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    July 15, 2020
  • Country of Origin:
    Japan
  • Country of Filming:
    Japan, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Part of the exhibition "where will I be buried?", curated by Muse Dodd and Catherine Feliz
    New York City
    United States
    July 16, 2020
Director Biography - Nine Chiyoko Yamamoto-Masson

Nine Yamamoto-Masson is Japanese-French interdisciplinary artist, practising theorist, researcher, writer, translator, and community organiser.
In academic research, pedagogic and artistic practice, her work analyses the gendered necropolitics of (neo)coloniality with regard to the legacies of Japanese, European, and US (military) imperialisms, whose coded architectures of power and economies of knowledge continue to subject bodies and futures to violent disciplining. Her artistic research embraces many methods, such as drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, performances, collage, poetry, writing, sound, video, curating. Rooted in a decolonial abolitionist feminist framework, her work engages with the modes of organisation and artistic practices of networked resistance to the above, future-building, peace activism, the workings of resistant living archives and anti-imperialist disruptions of revisionist dominant narratives, focusing on the role of art in inter-diasporic, internationalist, inter-generational solidarities and knowledge production.

Particular focus is placed on 20th and 21st century Japan, its state-enforced historical taboos and programmed amnesia, and how the past, present, and future temporalities of the Asia-Pacific region and (inter)Asian diasporas worldwide, as well as within global decolonial processes and memory-work. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). In 2018 and 2019 she was a visiting researcher-artist at Hiroshima City University.

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