HAKUMU

Eiko has repeated flashbacks from childhood. In that place where she is enveloped by a huge noise, a boy starts running and Eiko falls off a swing. Are they memories or dreams, or are they the present day, or do they belong to someone else? The sound expands. That’s really something huge.

Aya adapts Hyakken Uchida’s eponymous short story in which characters wonder whether they are alive or dead, as the reality of their existence is swept from under their feet.

Amid an urban crowd, a man is sleeping—or perhaps unconscious. Nobody pays him any attention, but then an insect crawls into his body. He begins to experience strange events at the threshold between reality and fantasy.

Is it the clock ticking? It's a somewhat damp noise. The footsteps of a girl walking on hill, overexposed shots of a girl on tatami mats, a girl collapsing in the street, written characters stuck to skin, characters strewn about on tatami mats, the body, clothing, and light. The texture of 8mm film and digital video. Congestion, breathing, sounds made by the body, the sound of silence. A work that creates a feeling of lightheadedness in the midst of a collision of physiology, light, and sound.

“The Earth with be obliterated in 2012”. “That sucks”. A man carrying a black lump. A screaming male high-school student. A prophet. A throng of children. Sound that sticks out of the shot, sound that comes in, sequencing and cutting off of images, and editing that undermines the independence of the shot make explicit the uncertainty of “now/here”.

I thought I would only sleep at night, but I can always go anywhere, far away from here to there. A study for the first entrance examination of the graduate school of Tokyo University of the Arts.

Your apartment is making you anxious. No, it’s not neurosis this time. A phone call causes wild, blood-curdling panic. Your present didn’t begin just now. The small music box carries you into a liminal space — somewhere between the sofa and yesterday, between childhood and analog cinema. What even is this place I call home? And who is this person that reminds me of myself?