116 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103and who can stay, and with what basis of differentiation. Again, a new
gap, a new separator, a new frontier and a new opposition to all these.But what is the significance of memory and traveling back and
forth in time, which also seems to be important for you?“1001 Martian Homes” is based on a mental exercise that involved
placing ourselves in the future and calling up this very moment
from the past. It also intrigues me how stories lose their details over
generations. My maternal family tree, a record going back seven
generations, for example, starts with a story of the first person of
the family to set foot in Sumatra in the 1700s—again, this was way
before the idea of Indonesia, that only materialized in the late
1920s. The story goes that he came with very little money that he
subsequently lost through gambling! This might have happened
during the course of a decade, but what we know now is just boiled
down into one sentence. What kind of gambling was this man
involved in? An investment is also a gamble. Likewise, if we look
at this young woman in episode four of Proposal for a Film, what
kind of business was her great-grandparents setting up? Collecting
waste cardboard is also a business. In fact, many Filipino domestic
workers—who I befriended during “Trade/Trace/Transit”—go
back and forth between the Philippines and Hong Kong, leaving
their daughters with their mothers, a surrogate family. In just
three generations these details can be lost. Official history seems
to mimic this loss of details. I wonder if it’s the nature of memory
that we are doomed to forget. If we are, then this might explain
recursive patterns in history. We are like King Sisyphus, punished
in the Greek Underworld to push a boulder up the hill only to have
the rock rolling down and hitting us again, for eternity.
“1001 Martian Homes” sounds so somber! Your previous works
that incorporated the passport, map and the wall during your
PhD studies, such as the “(Re)Collection of Togetherness” series
(2007– ), Lure (2009), Terra Incognita, et cetera (2009) and
Nous ne notons pas les fleurs (various iterations since 2009),
had a sense of play, openness and community. What happened
to this notion of “hope”?
I think all the works in “1001 Martian Homes” are as playful—and
as complex—as my other works. The fact that the project can only
work in pairs also sets up a kind of community in the process
of making as as well as during the exhibition. As for “hope,” I
don’t think any of my work shows hope. I think of them as either
conversation starters, or memento mori. Your heart might beat
faster when you see colorful passports from 150-odd countries in
the world composed in a rainbow of color gradation in “(Re)
Collection of Togetherness.” You can stop there, go home happy
and ignore the fact that these passports show how demarcated
and imbalanced our world is, or you could simply go through the
installation and look back, and see all the dead mosquitoes and the
blood specks in the pages. You can then remember that when you
swat a mosquito, the blood speck on your palm is likely yours. You
can delightfully play along and make a new world map in Terra
Incognita, et cetera, until you feel uneasy that you might have
been tolerating colonization. You might get excited to see all the
passports in a claw vending machine in Lure until you try and try
and the passports keep sliding off the claws, while the next person
playing the machine might inexplicably have it easy and win two
passports in a row.
TERRA INCOGNITA, ET CETERA, 2009,
performed by Hiroki Yamamoto, installation
view. Courtesy Royal College of Art, London.