(re)collection (2012)
Taro Hattori
Everything I Could Lose (excerpt), 2012
Video, total running time 45:00
“They lost everything. This word ‘everything’ is a word we use everyday but at the time we experience what it really means, it must become speechless. It was very difficult to make a new work in reaction to such a surpassing disaster. I also encountered an ethical issue where we all actually have many practical things we can do for them, and we don't. Immediately I started thinking about why Itzhak Perlman played violin on TV right after 9/11. This should be my job.
Imagining pain of the people who had lost everything was my beginning. Soon, I connected the words, ‘Evacuation’ and ‘Eviction,’ and the image of piled-up ‘everything’ in front of evicted houses overlapped on overflowing amount of images of endless debris from the places impacted by the tsunami.
At any moment of my life, your life, something unexpected will happen and we can all possibly lose ‘everything’ we have. I was not normally aware of how much I had been supported by the actual physical objects around me. Of course, information in my brain and on my computer is very important, but also this indefinable and intimate materiality of objects is everything.
We all cannot experience the pain of others. That's always the beginning of all trouble and sadness. So, I decided to, at least, experience physically the materiality of everything I have. Everything I could lose at any moment. I am losing them at least by the time I die.” – Taro Hattori
(re)collection – A collaboration with Lost and Found: Family Photos Swept by the 3.11 East Japan Tsunami
September 12 – October 27, 2012
Intersection for the Arts
San Francisco, CA
Photo credit: Taro Hattori