This work was shown at OzAsia Festival, Adelaide on 22 September – 28 October 2007 and a snippet was broadcast on Sunday Arts for ABC Television.
Here are the notes on this work from the exhibition program – Please note, The “I” within the blurb refer to Yumi Umiumare.
The original impulse for this piece came from the ancient Japanese belief in Sakasama: the reverse world. The two worlds of Life and Death are described as two shores; one is ‘the near shore’ (the world of the living), and the other is ‘the far shore’ (the world of after-death). A river flows between them. ‘The far shore’ is a reversed world: it is the reverse of the world of the living and everything is upside down. I drew an analogy between ‘the far shore’ and my own experience of Australia as an upside down version of Japan, with reversed seasons. In this video work, I also explore the juxtaposition of my (Japanese) presence in Australian landscape, experimenting with the neutrality of emotion and colour, and to manipulate rhythms.
I am in the maze.
I am wandering around the space between,
crossing the shores between here and there.
The world here looks normal and the world here looks abnormal.
The world there looks abnormal and the world there looks normal.
I am surrounded by these unknown voids.
The void creates some fluid and transparent shapes.
I dive into them and they disappear.
Dual, triple, multiple existences of my body floats here and there.
I keep wandering this unknown space between.
Original concept and Creation: Yumi Umiumare
in collaboration with Bambang Nurcahyadi
Video and Sound edited by Bambang Nurcahyadi and Ian Corcoran
Videography by Richard Back, Anthony Pelchen and Yumi Umiumare
The project is supported by Flinders Drama Centre, University of Adelaide, OzAsia Festival, and Australia Council For The Arts through its program Cultural Diversity Cluster
