Manuel Schilcher

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Manuel Schilcher

Participating Project	Research Residency Program
Activity Based	Austria
City	Tokyo
Period	2016.2 - 2016.3

Purpose of the residency

Japan is home to over two hundred museums and exhibit halls that focus on the Asia-Pacific War. The stances of these museums vary considerably. Many museums unabashedly celebrate national military actions, other museums reject the legitimacy of war altogether and condemn World War II in particular. Researching these controversies about war memory I will focus mainly on two player who shape public opinion. On one side there are museums who tell individual stories of the same history and on the other side there are artists who worked earlier and increasingly in late years on these issues. Staying in Tokyo I will get in contact with both of them.

Plan during the residency

In Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka are a couple of museums which are in the focus of my research which I like to visit. Also I will get in contact with German-Japanese cultural and research centers like DIJ, OAG, ICC (Sophia University) and hopefully with Japanese artists who work on memory culture.

A main issue of my local research are traces of nazism and fascism in Japan. I will verify the historical knowledge of these traces I researched in scientific literature with the actual urban existence. The insight of these results will be part of artistic practices in the context of the politics of memory and my visual research.

One goal is to open a dialogue and active exchange between artists, historians and social scientists and examine Japanese cultural memory discourses. Is there a way to translate European memory culture and are there any limits that can be defined regarding the common memory culture? Through a creative dialogue and an active exchange between selected artistic and cultural works on memory I would like to elaborate a forthcoming exhibition and publication.

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