Zakkubalan

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Zakkubalan (Albert THOLEN & SORA Neo)

Participating Project	International Creator Residency Program
Activity Based	United States / Japan
City	Tokyo
Period	2022.9 - 2022.11

Purpose of the residency

Inspired by stories of the disconcerting natural phenomena that anticipate major earthquakes, we want to explore the puzzling moments that precede an unexpected disaster. In continuing our deconstruction of cinematic forms, we plan to divorce sound and image, presenting each separately to bring greater critical focus to each element. We will construct a soundscape that spans the fifteen minutes prior to the moment of disaster while shooting a series of documentary "moving photographs" that survey Tokyo's infrastructural and technological defenses against earthquakes—or the lack thereof for certain socio-economic classes and neighborhoods—and the city's visible history of calamity.

Plan during the residency

• Research the contemporary reality of earthquakes—Tokyo’s current and future capacity for early detection and warning by visiting the Japan Meteorological Agency, the material consequences of a catastrophic earthquake to the built environment, infrastructural developments for earthquake damage mitigation, and the socio-economic dimensions of a potential disaster.
  
• Research the historical context for, and implications of, earthquakes in Japan.
  
• Research Japanese folklore and anecdotal stories related to earthquakes.
  
• Record and mix the soundscape
  
• Shoot, process, and edit video into a curated collection of motion-photographs that document Tokyo’s infrastructural and technological defenses against earthquakes.
  

Activities during the residency

Taking the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 as our launching point, we investigated the question: what types of images of earthquakes can we find or create that doesn’t commodify disasters as spectacle? Through our research, we found two areas for investigation: The myth of the Namazu, and modern-day disaster prevention training. Each line of inquiry inspired works created during our residency at TOKAS. In Imagined Earthquake 01: One Yen City (Seismograph), we decided to use the one yen coin as our key material, collecting a coin for each of the 36,232 days since the Great Kanto Earthquake and shaping them into a mock city. In Imagined Earthquake 02: Simulation, we created a video piece in which we asked members of the local community to come and play the HUG (evacuation center operation) game, attempting to capture this image of an earthquake as it coheres in their imagination.

Outcome of the residency

The residency was successful and productive for us. We are quite happy with the two pieces we created, and we have strong leads for two more video pieces, which we plan to shoot sometime in the early spring. The idea of the ‘imagined earthquake” was a strong throughline for us, and got us thinking about new ways we could use our choice mediums (video/installation) to communicate an abstract image from subject to audience. We also ventured further into sculpture with the One Yen City—a test we were happy worked out positively. Given the success of the One Yen City, we plan to incorporate more sculptural elements into our future work depending on the project/proposal.

Creator Information
Creator Information