Ocean of Stars 2025.11.23

About the Three Pieces of "Ocean of Stars"
Mother Tree
This work grew from visits to an ancient katsura tree ...approximately 1,000 years old ... standing at the border of Higashikawa and Biei, revered as a forest deity. Inspired by Dr. Suzanne Simard's The Mother Tree, and shaped by nearly 20 years of connection with Ainu elders Ashiri Rera and Hiroko Kawakami, their communities, and the children around them, the piece asks a central question: standing on the layered strata of history...including Hokkaido's colonial past...how can we truly nurture one another on this rich and demanding land? The Ainu word ires (to nurture) runs through the work as a guiding spirit. Field recordings from Susukino and Nibutani are woven together with the melody of Iyomante (the Bear Ceremony) and Iyonnokka, a lullaby sung by Saki Yamamichi.
human animal
This piece reclaims the phrase "human animal"... used as a slur against Palestinians by an Israeli defense minister ... and transforms it into a vision of humanity as one animal among many aboard Spaceship Earth. Drawing on her personal history of psychiatric disability and her relationships with the Ainu people, the artist questions how we might build ways of living that do not reduce others ... human or non-human ... to objects of domination or exploitation. The phrase echoes darker histories: the human zoo of the 1889 Paris Exposition, and the Nazi T4 Program of 1939, which killed approximately 200,000 people with disabilities deemed "unworthy of life."These histories illuminate the same logic underlying colonialism, environmental destruction, and war in the Anthropocene. Field recordings ... Apollo 11 audio, migrating swans on Lake Nibutani, ocean waves ... are layered with the Ainu kamuy-invoking song Chup ka wa. The piece affirms that all expression is an act of reclaiming language: not to survive, but to feel, to be, and to share.
Ocean of Stars
If every life were a light, the world would look like an ocean of stars ... each one flickering, illuminating the others. The memories of those no longer with us, and the footprints of ancestors, shine on as starlight that still guides us. Gazing up at Hokkaido's winter Milky Way ... fierce and breathtaking ... the artist envisioned Uresipamosirir, the Ainu phrase for "a land where we nurture one another,"as exactly this: an ocean of stars. The piece weaves in a melody from Hikaru Ame (Luminous Rain), composed for a dear friend from Tōhoku, and a passage from Kenji Miyazawa's Hoshi Meguri no Uta. We are like flocks of swans crossing that ocean of light ... hearts sometimes breaking, navigating by feeling ... lives traveling, flickering, and resonating with one another.