Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives (25 images)
Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives with Migiwa Orimo and Kei Ito (FOTOFOCUS BIENNIAL 2018: OPEN ARCHIVE)
September 20, 2018–December 7, 2018
Herndon Gallery, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH
PROOFS of BURDEN, Installation by Migiwa Orimo
For the Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives exhibition, Migiwa Orimo has created an installation entitled “Proofs of Burden.” Using the concept of storage/archive as her framework, Orimo explores the relationship between public memory and private space by examining: how memories are shared and internalized; how they are stored and become stories; and, how memories and history collide.
Drawing upon—and is inspired by—three archives (the National Archives, the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center archives, and the archives of the National Museum of the United States Air Force), Orimo has installed five cabinets which consist of her own compilations and categorization of archival material. Each cabinet has a desk with a binder of errata (correction notes) that “present our complex relationship to repositories of historical information in a slightly subversive way.”
Orimo writes: “Today we capture our memories in thousands of digital images and store them in clouds. In stores–in aisle after aisle–we find all sorts of readymade charms for making memory scrapbooks for various occasions. Are ‘outsourcing memories’ and ‘buying nostalgia’ forms of forgetting? What happens when we are confronted with disturbing historical images– do we cover our eyes to suppress (and therefore censor) them? My desire is to create an installation that asks these questions: What is the act of remembering the past and the present? What gets altered or erased along the way? And how do these memories become history?”
