Family Story

In summer 2018, I visited a small town in Niigata Prefecture in the northwest of Japan, where my family came from. It had been a long time since I last visited the house where my grandparents lived for the last decades of their lives, until they were moved to live in a nursing home. My grandparents’ voices and laughter and the sounds of TV shows that they loved and of the phone ringing­ – those memories were evoked vividly from the dust, the weightless accumulation of absence, to reawaken old pain inside, as if to scratch the skin that hid it, in facing the material end. In a few weeks we were to have the house demolished.

I was obsessed by a fierce urge to experience the irresistible passage of time, sensate and tangible in the light of the imminence of the last material moment. I was too obsessed for that to be realised within the stillness that was conceived by the four sides of the frame of the fixed camera. It was, however, the beginning of the ontological relationship between what I filmed in order to remember and that which was about to disappear materially. Later, I filmed the process of the demolition of the house and conjoined it with footage of my grandmother in the nursing home being fed by my brothers and father.

Family Story, a video triptych whose title alludes to Ozu Yasujiro’s 1953 film Tokyo Story , a narrative of a Japanese family dispersed between the centre and peripheries in the dawn of post-war capitalism, was originally produced in the framework of my thesis You Saw Nothing: Sight, Digital Video, Post-3.11 Japan (2021), in response to de-populated and ageing societies in rural regions facing precarious futures and social systems within the edifice of economic growth. The original edition of Family Story has no subtitles.