To visualize the unseen

Landscapes change due to social circumstances, human activity, and sometimes natural disasters. What sort of event-driven changes and transitions have shaped the landscape we see today? And following on from that, how will the way we perceive the landscape now change when we take another look at the landscape through the filter of the memories and records of other people?

In this discussion, we welcome as our guests Yoichi Sato, who collects photographs taken by American military personnel and individuals in order to explore what Tokyo looked like just after Japan’s poorly-chronicled wartime defeat, and whose research focuses on the gap between the Tokyo as seen by Americans and Tokyo as seen by Japanese people; and Natsumi Seo, who is based in Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture where she walks along the post Great East Japan Earthquake Tohoku coast visiting people and communities who carry memories of before and after the war, engaging in practices to pass down memories of the land by chronicling the landscape and the words she encounters there.

By shifting our perspectives, and encountering the memories and views of others with regard to the landscape we see now and the events we know, can this lead us to thinking about the times in which we live? How can we pass down the lives and the things that have slipped through the cracks of historical fact? With questions like these in mind, we find out from our two guests about the practices they have accumulated, the perspectives and possibilities those practices have engendered, and explore the pointers to be had from them.