| In my Cinemage project, which refers to images from cinema, and homage to cinema, I show these still photo images through old-fashioned slide projections. At times, with music improvised by solo or duo guitarists, or without music, silent. Imagine a slide show that a family used to enjoy in their living room back in the 60s and 70s, looking back upon their own life. I trace my own memories, and try to find something from the accumulation of images I collected over the past years. It’s a spectacle made of hundreds, thousands, countless memories. The past is nothing more than the past, each single memory reduced to a sheep, wedging itself into the realm of forgottenness. The memories are mere shadows of the former days, which have lost their vivid texture. |  |
Aki Onda
It has been a long time since I began keeping a diary. It first started around the end of the 80s in a musical form of using a cassette Walkman, then later, in a visual form of taking photographs. When I come across something that I want to remember, I push the shutter or the record button. Like a diary of sounds or visual images. Why do I keep doing this? I think it’s just an obsession.
In my Cinemage project, which refers to images from cinema, and homage to cinema, I show these still photo images through old-fashioned slide projections. At times, with music improvised by solo or duo guitarists, or without music, silent. Imagine a slide show that a family used to enjoy in their living room back in the 60s and 70s, looking back upon their own life. I trace my own memories, and try to find something from the accumulation of images I collected over the past years. It’s a spectacle made of hundreds, thousands, countless memories.
The past is nothing more than the past, each single memory reduced to a sheep, wedging itself into the realm of forgottenness. The memories are mere shadows of the former days, which have lost their vivid texture. When these countless fragments innocently cavort, something resembling the essence of memory, swathed in a transparent light, may surface from chaotic sediments. This is a lucid moment, when scenes witnessed before, sounds heard before, all seem to flash back in a single spectacle. This may be something like a primal landscape of memory. Invisible to the eye, but undeniably existing in this world, it is where each finds solace and foundation for his or her life. My desire was to weave in my own story while arriving at something that transcends personal attributes.
There is a reference to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a film that was made by still photo images, and was about a man who is haunted by his past memories. The ceaseless flow of the images—still moments within a movement, against the ever-shifting, and fluid guitar improvisation—creates a feeling of déjà vu. Can you catch these moments? No, you can’t—it’s in a lost world which all individuals retain in their minds that these fleeting moments reside.
