Photographs, old photographs, texts, letters, maps, audio & video interview

2014 onwards, India & Japan

Emonogatari (‘picture stories’ in Japanese) is a collaborative visual art project with narratives rewritten from old photographs, letters and audio & video interviews related to WWII (1939-45). By exploring witnesses’ voices and their old family albums, each story was excavated through interviews with the aid of young collaborators, who ultimately had their age old family memories revived as their own stories, which became woven into a landscape becoming a newly revised visual history.

Kisaku Onoda, Shiho Kito’s grand-uncle, went missing in action during his service for the Japanese Imperial Army. No one knew what had happened to him except for Takeshi, her grandfather who claimed to have seen Kisaku, his elder brother coming to see him to tell of his own death. This project evolved from this story which remained unexplored until Shiho’s grandfather’s death at 89 in 2014.

This project was conceived in Japan and made in India during my whole-year fellowship from Agency of Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan at National Institute of Design in 2014-15.