Could art respond to the outcry of the other?
Could art maintain the responsibility to the suffering of the other?
Could art fulfill the responsibility to the voices of the other?
R2
Responding: International Performance Art Festival and Meeting is a new challenge of responding to social issues and problems through performance art and thus facilitating critical dialogue between art and society. Through a combination of research, creation, and performance, we will shed new light on social issues from multiple perspectives. Since its first festival and meeting (R1) at Tokyo/Fukushima in Japan in 2018, Responding has explored new horizons for the mutual understanding of specific social issues beyond national borders.
In 2019, we are currently pursuing a research-based art project “monumentED” (R2) in Japan and the Philippines. As current international controversy over so-called “statues of comfort women” exemplifies, a monument often functions as a site of political contestation over the meanings of the past. Yet, these statues and other physical objects are not the only agents that could work as an index referring to past events. Every person has diverse and unique histories of his/her own, which could disclose the meaningful past by themselves.
R2 monumentED explores these small histories of lived experience working as “proto-monument,” which has not yet been incorporated into, or in some instances may drop out of, dominant narratives of communal memory represented in capital-letter Monument. Furthermore, by focusing on a critical moment in which these small stories are legitimatized, metamorphosed, and incorporated into a formal Monument, the bastion of collective memory, the project also illuminates social, political, and artistic implications drawn from the dynamic process of being “monumented.”