The Arnemuidenproject -afterthoughts



(summary)

In 2003, I initiated the Arnemuiden project to search for 'mythical senses' in the memories and histories of people in the Dutch fishing village, Arnemuiden. The term 'mythical senses' derives from my childhood memories of a dual life between the city of Tokyo and the country fishing village of Kubotsu. It is a metaphor for senses I find essential for living, which we seem to quickly lose in our 'first world market' oriented day to day existence.

During the process of searching for 'mythical senses' in a different cultural context, I wished to give new forms to those senses in making art works such as drawings and animations.

Since words and images I had encountered through the research and interviews in Arnemuiden were quite different to that which I had imagined, the project had found a new way to carry itself on. In this given context, I began to map diverse memories from different people, time and culture in a playful way. This process of 'memory mapping' has lead to unique presentations ranging from street performances and a publication to a boat trip as the final exhibition in May-June 2005.

In searching for 'mythical senses', I have tried to listen to the words, gestures and stories of people as much as I could. When I encountered memories and stories, which touched me, regardless of time and culture, I traced those feelings in my art works. I wish strongly to create an environment in our daily world, in which people have a sense of connection to 'others' beyond time and space. To attempt this: Who's stories do I listen to? What memories do I trace and to whom do I tell those memories? With these questions I take the next steps in my practicing art.






(full version)

Since the Arnemuidenproject was my first large scale project in which I combined both an artistic and a social scientific approach, every step in realizing different presentations was taken in trial and error. During two years of working, ideas developed and methods changed. By observing the overall development of the project, it is a pleasure to begin to see and feel more clearly what my core theme for practicing art is, and most importantly, visions for the next steps.


A- looking for 'mythical senses' in Arnemuiden
B- how I pictured and experienced Arnemuiden
C- the final presentation: 'water memory mapping' and the next steps



A- looking for 'mythical senses' in Arnemuiden

At an early stage of the project, after basic research on Arnemuiden in the Zeeland Archive at the end of 2004, I was aiming to search for 'mythical senses' in the life, memories and histories of the villagers. Those 'mythical senses' I would find by collecting local stories and memories (both communal and private) and trace them from different generations. These local stories and memories could include folk tales, songs, folk dances or a personal memory.

As many people have asked "why", I would like to explain how I came to the concept of searching for 'mythical senses'.

What do I mean by 'mythical senses'?

Every person carries 'mythical senses' within themselves.
My focus is on the senses, emotions and imagination of each person, which try to describe something beyond one's being. We try to make sense out of the unknown by giving words and stories to them. This happens continually, everywhere: Sensing godlike nature in the blowing wind or the breath of trees, hearing voices of the dead who were dear to you or talking about an imaginary person while hearing footsteps outside the house at night... are for example small gestures of those senses. Those daily senses of joy, fear or the uncanny¡Ä from people are movements of their imagination towards the different elements of daily existence.

After some years of living in the Netherlands, I have come to observe an absence or concealment of 'mythical spaces' in people's life. 'Mythical spaces' are the places where people are triggered to feel and express 'mythical senses'.

I have my simple hypothesis for this observation.

Coming from a country where seventy percent of the land is mountain district, one of the most striking features of the Netherlands for me is the landscape and people's life in relation to it. The landscape which is composed with structured 'kanaalen' (canals) and 'dijks' (dikes), instead of deep woods and mountains is of course a source of Dutch pride and a symbol of her long history of conquering the natural power of water. But at the same time, I suppose that this history and conquered landscape has perhaps been concealing some part of people's daily senses.

The concept of 'mythical senses' strongly originates from my mother's culture and my own childhood experiences of a dual life in Tokyo city and a small fishing village (KUBOTSU, my mother's home). I find these senses to be basic signs of human life and consider this concept to add essential value to our existence.

During recent years, I have given much more attention to this notion as I notice that we tend more and more to be disconnected from these "mythical senses" in our 'first world (Western) market economy oriented' existence. From this personal perspective, my interest and wonder has grown. How does one interact with such senses in this country? My impression by talking to people is that they hardly refer to mythical stories or feelings in their everyday communication.

Is it that they don't exist for people here? Or perhaps those senses appear in different forms? Do they value other senses instead?

This was the reason I wanted to attempt researching this issue. I also needed to question my own values by mirroring them in another's cultural perceptions. In my project, I wished to express my personal awareness and thoughts in making art works, by observing, perceiving, imagining different ways of giving gestures from the words of the people in Arnemuiden.

I believe that 'mythical senses' are original sources for a creation of so-called folk tales or myths.
When some vivid (or deeper) emotion is shared in a community and forms a shape, it brings people a potential to create such stories. In my experience, it seems that such creations tend to occur more naturally or obviously when people live close to nature. People talk simply more often about the mythical power of sea, wind, woods, creatures and so on since they live with those non-controllable natural elements. By comparing the artificial Dutch landscape to the one in Japan, it is not strange to presume that people simply lack spaces to feel 'mythical senses' in the Netherlands.

This is also why I had intentionally chosen a fishermen's village as a research location, where people live together with the sea and fish, close to nature. In this way, I could also compare my experiences in a Japanese fishermen's village with one in a Dutch village. It was through a network of people that I was generously allowed to work in Arnemuiden and it came as a total shock to find out that the village, in fact ,had historically lost its access to the sea in order to protect people's lives from water disasters. I had never imagined a fishermen's village without the sea before.



B- how I pictured and experienced Arnemuiden

At the very beginning stage of fantasizing about the project, I pictured Arnemuiden as a fishermen's village with some nostalgic atmosphere. Since I had seen many neatly renovated Dutch suburban cities and villages during the past years, my expectation of such nostalgic scenery and atmosphere was not so high. But when I visited Arnemuiden for the first time in the summer of 2003, it still gave me a strong impact to realize that such a nostalgic atmosphere or smell of history has almost totally been washed out from the village.

Approximately forty elderly women who still wear traditional clothes as daily wear add a special atmosphere, especially because their looks stand out in the modernized appearance of the village. Besides this, the only place which seemed to still hold such an atmosphere was the shipyard Meerman, which used to be the centre of the village when the fishery was still based in Arnemuiden. After the whole geographical reconstruction of waterways in the area of Walcheren in the province of Zeeland, fishing boats are now based in the port of the neighboring city Vlissingen. All the fishermen from Arnemuiden go there by cars to get on boats to fish in the North Sea.

Now when I look back, I was then expecting some kind of miracle encounter with people in the community of Arnemuiden. Despite the fact that my understanding of Zeeland dialect was very minimal, I thought self confidently that 'There will be local stories and I will find them. Then I will be accepted by people from the community by showing my respect for those stories and their resulting inspiration'.

The reality of course did not follow my fantasy and I immediately encountered some difficulties. The village not having the sea anymore was just a beginning.
After interviewing some people, I had to face the fact that there was a lack of local stories in the community. Not just once, did people say , 'No, we don't have these stories'. 'We don't have any folk dance'. 'Such a song never existed'.
While I was receiving such answers, I was always aware of what I had heard of Arnemuiden: that many people there are very religious and not allowed to speak of superstitious stories ('bijgeloven').

When I heard a story about a 'toverbrug (magic bridge)' which people crossed while vending fish in the old days, it was one of the most exciting moments during the interviews. Although I felt that I was hearing some 'mythical senses' during these moments, I did not go deeper into those stories. Instead, I decided to be very careful. This was perhaps because of my fear of provoking some communal or individual resentment by my misrepresenting their belief and values. It was not that I did not dare, but I judged my position in the situation as too vulnerable to go into details. I was simply too unaware of their own language and cultural codes. Therefore I decided not to refer directly to those stories in my works, but instead I used feelings which I received from them to create my drawings and animation pieces.

Next to such memories, there was an unforgettable moment: I was listening to a former fisherman telling me about how he used to fish in the early years at his house. At a certain moment, while imagining scenes from his story, I stared at his big working hands. That specific moment brought a clear picture of the port in KUBOTSU into my head, even with the scent of sea salt!

This was the turning point when I shifted my method of carrying on my project and production of art works.

A concept of 'memory mapping' appeared after this peculiar experience of two total different scenes merging in my body which was triggered by memories of a former fishermen who I did not know before. If the Arnemuiden community does not share any communal story, and if my stance is to stay careful by not digging into their 'belief' and 'values', what I could do was to start dealing with materials in a much more playful way. With the new concept of 'memory mapping', I began to combine different words, sounds and images of memories I collected in Arnemuiden together with my own memories from KUBOTSU. My imagination was triggered by this process and lead me into creating new non-narrative stories.

As a result, whole presentations and works carried an open atmosphere. Non-narrative stories appeared as an ambiguous and somewhat mysterious world which is not either exactly from Arnemuiden nor KUBOTSU. Every presentation approached diverse people from the performers to the audience in a frank way. This was well represented in the nature of¡¡the street performances in the second mid-presentation (see also 'mid-presentations' on DVD) or the final presentation 'water memory mapping'.



C- the final presentation: 'water memory mapping' and the next steps

'Water memory mapping' was a boat exhibition traveling from Amsterdam to Arnemuiden. The 'water memory mapping' boat travelled around 200km while lowering its gangplank to people in different cities during her journey to Arnemuiden. The "traveling boat on waters" was a metaphor for how we carry memories. Different memories come together in one body and transform themselves by merging into different ones, and again scatter away. It is an endless repetitive variation, just like waves in water. And just as waters spread endlessly, memories reach everywhere and elsewhere. I had enclosed my 'memory mapping' world in the boat and invited people to step in and travel with me. In this way, the experiences and memories of people who have nothing to do with Arnemuiden could merge into the 'memory mapping' world and disperse from there again.

In Arnemuiden the boat lay at an old historical shipyard in the village. Placing a 'water memory mapping' boat which exhibited works referring to the history of Arnemuiden, into an existing location in the village was an essential element to the presentation. It created a platform for people to wander through their own memories and experiences triggered in a context which was very familiar to their daily life. For me, the creation of such a platform and people's experiences as whole is a work of art. I believe that my gestures of art need to occur alongside streams of daily life to allow a more "REAL" experience.


What I had practiced in the Arnemuidenproject was an active form of searching for ways to encounter others, instead of my 'already made art works' waiting for audience to find them. Exactly because of this trial and error, the project has been a successful mission and memories from this project will surely be woven into my future works and projects.

In Arnemuiden, people's belief in Protestantism and the Bible has probably taken over the function of the communal story, and these beliefs work much stronger and deeper than the way I perceive 'mythical senses' working as sources for communal stories in our daily world. As I mentioned before, a story like the 'toverbrug (magic bridge)' did exist, but only few people still feel the need for such stories nowadays. I have understood through the interviews that people used to tell more of such stories when street lights and televisions did not exist. This supports to a certain extent, my presumption that people are triggered to feel 'mythical senses' when they live closer to a natural environment.

It is my impression that people are forgetting those stories almost intentionally, by kind of shrugging their shoulders and saying 'those days are over'. Of course life styles of people these days change with speed, but people carry on their memories. Not everybody, but many people, especially elderly people, were very enthusiastic when they told me about their past in Arnemuiden. How beautiful it was when ships used to come back to the village, how poor people have been, how cold it was to fish on a Hoogaars ship¡¡(a typical old sail ship from Zeeland). In this project, I wanted to listen to the stories as much as I could. But I wondered: who are their listeners nowadays? Stories and memories are there to be listened to and to be told in turn. This question is not only to be considered in the context of Arnemuiden but it directly reflects back to myself. To who do I/we tell stories and memories? To who and what do I/we/new generations listen to? Searching answers for these questions will be my issue for the next steps in my practicing art.


June 2006 Amsterdam
Takako Hamano


(text editing by Danny)