In Conversation: Souvenir – Justine Daquin in conversation with Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian
Souvenir coalesces two seemingly disparate stories together—a family member's experience of surviving a tsunami and the longest transoceanic journey of marine organisms. It documents plastic debris that traveled from Tōhoku, Japan across the Pacific Ocean over the span of a decade and washed ashore on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America in 2022, covered with a diverse ecosystem of marine life. The two-channel video and sound installation employs various image technologies—an underwater camera, a cell phone, a drone camera—to build a visual vocabulary that can speak to the multi-scalar impacts of personal and ecological loss, and to speculate on strategies of survival across species and coasts.
Artists Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian are collaborators who come from divergent backgrounds, spanning photography, moving-image work, and curatorial practice. For this project, they worked with Ohan’s family member Mineko Ikehashi, who shares her experience of surviving a tsunami. In the beginning moments of Souvenir, Mineko recollects her memory of regaining consciousness after being caught in the wave, and seeing a cat on a piece of wood floating alongside her. It is at this moment that she knew she survived. This story inspired Ohan and Shoghig to visit the coast of Washington in North America, where plastic debris from the 2011 Tōhoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami washes ashore to this day. Shown within the Shapeshifters exhibition, curated by Justine Daquin, at POUSH, Paris, Souvenir is a story of resilience: that of marine species and human beings, whose destinies were intertwined more than a decade ago.
– Justine Daquin
View of Souvenir by Ohan Breiding & Shoghig Halajian. In Shapeshifers, curated by Justine Daquin. POUSH (FR), 23/03/23 - 03/05/23
© Camille Lemonnier
Souvenir, video still, 2023.
Courtesy of Ohan Breiding & Shoghig Halajian and Ochi Gallery.
Souvenir, video still, 2023.
Courtesy of Ohan Breiding & Shoghig Halajian and Ochi Gallery.
JD: Ohan, shall we start with you telling me a bit about Souvenir and how this exhibition began with Mineko’s story?
OB: For my first solo exhibition with Ochi Gallery in 2019, I made an installation consisting of a sound piece, a recording of a Skype conversation with Mineko where she describes the moment of waking up from unconsciousness after a tsunami. She says: “When I opened my eyes, I saw a cat sitting on a wooden box floating next to me. We looked at each other and I knew we were alive. My name Mineko means three cats in Japanese, my mother’s name means four cats.” This sound recording was accompanied by a sculptural installation with seven ceramic cats sitting on the floor of the gallery. The sculptures serve as altar pieces and are each based on my friends' cats, from my immediate Los Angeles queer community. Each sculpture had Japanese Cedar incense inside of it, with faint smoke coming out of the mouths to give them a sense of movement and change while referring to the dead. Along with these sculptures, I asked my blood-related family members who live in land-locked Switzerland, to recreate Hokusai’s well-known Great Wave, with crayons and markers that they had readily available. It was an intergenerational collaboration that expanded out from this single memory.
JD: You worked on Souvenir with Shoghig, and before that, you worked as a solo artist for a long time. When did you start wanting to collaborate with Shoghig who is not initially an artist but a curator ? What drove you two to work on the video, The Rebel Body (2019), and then again on Souvenir, which is about your family history?
OB: I was offered a job as a professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Sho was writing her dissertation so we both decided to move to the East Coast in 2019. We learned of The Coastal and Ocean Studies program at Williams-Mystic whose former director, Jim Carlton, is the first scientist to publish a study on the transoceanic migration of plastic debris that started with the 2011 tsunami off the coast of Japan. It is the longest migration via plastic debris that has ever been recorded. In Jim’s research, he focuses on plastic human-made objects that become rafting islands for coastal species–like barnacles and oysters–allowing them to travel across the Pacific Ocean for over a decade. This led Shoghig and I to consider a cross-species approach to the project, where we brought together Mineko’s personal recollection of the events–and the shifting of memory–with the migratory behavior of marine life, both in response to the major environmental phenomena of an earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Ocean.
SH: We informally collaborated on a few projects in the past, and then in a more focused way on a 2019 film, titled The Rebel Body. In 2016, we went on a trip to Switzerland—during this time Ohan was researching the local history of the town of Glarus, which implemented the last legal persecution for witchcraft in 1782. A woman named Anna Göldi was the victim of this state-sanctioned murder, and then in 2007, the government of Glarus apologized and posthumously exonerated her, and installed a memorial in her name in the town center. During this trip, I coincidentally was reading Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch (2004), on the European history of the witch-hunts, which explores its broader role in gendered violence and the privatization of shared resources of land throughout Europe. This common interest brought us together on the project, and we started documenting Göldi’s final route throughout the town, and then exploring how her story lives on and haunts the present, as town residents’ recount the collective memory of this event, which of course varied from person to person. In general, we tend to regularly share our work with each other, intimately entering each other’s thinking and making processes. So it was an easy and organic step to work together. Although Souvenir takes up a different topic and process, it is still exploring ideas from our original collaboration in terms of shifting memory, debunking the fixity of a single reality, and the landscape as a witness to social and historic ruptures.
JD: The work is both a kind of scientific documentary and a personal testimony, and that limit is blurred in the work because of the way Jim and Mineko speak. In the case of Mineko, you don’t really know if she speaks like that, as it feels almost otherworldly. She speaks really slowly and with very short sentences, but it has a strong impact. I am wondering if you, Shoghig, can describe the writing process. Did you write some of that or was it just her? How did your writing come into place within the piece and within the voiceover of the piece?
SH: The text is a hybrid testimony that began with Mineko’s writings, audio recordings of memories, and our conversations with her. We took excerpts from these and developed a voiceover that could generate the feeling of loss but not necessarily share all the facts in a confessional way. I worked with Mineko to bring together different perspectives on the tsunami, including folkloric ideas of environmental catastrophe, recollections of personal and felt sensations, and scientific and speculative accounts. Similarly, with Jim, we recorded our conversations and then developed a short voiceover text. We imagined their voices having a loose dialogue with each other across distance and across experiences.
The two voices in the video work have very different tones and approaches, a drastically different felt reality—the personal stakes, the scientific stakes–and this undoubtedly had a gendered component. There is Mineko’s emotional experience and felt memories, and Jim’s scientific analysis. So we wanted to blur these distinctions. As Mineko speaks, her words start to incorporate scientific ideas on the shifting axis of the earth and prediction methods, and Jim sounds more and more poetic, focusing on the smaller scale. For example, he poses the question: What is time for a barnacle?
JD: So you asked them to re-do the voices at one point?
OB, SH: Yes.
JD: For me, something really powerful –I said ‘otherworldly’–is that Mineko pauses a lot. Maybe it comes from the fact that she is Japanese, and this informs how she speaks English. Like me, English is not her first language, so her pronunciation, intonations, and pacing have a layered dynamic, with her original language. When she says, “You have to listen to the silence,” she is referring to the landscape but it really feels as if she is also inviting you to listen to the silences between her words. This is very beautiful. Your work is called Souvenir, and most of your work is based on souvenirs (as memories and memorabilia), and how everything can be connected together, even though souvenirs are incomplete most of the time. How is silence a protagonist in your work, or how is the process of looking for souvenirs important?
OB: Silence is an undercurrent in my work, as an invitation to actively listen. The first direct exploration of this was in the 2015 exhibition, titled Epitaph for Family, which Shoghig curated at Human Resources in Los Angeles. There was one piece in particular in the exhibition, Magic Hour, which I also screened at Ocean Space (Venice, Italy) when we all did the TBA-21 Ocean Space fellowship together. The installation consists of a three-channel video and sound work and a two-channel 16mm film projection that depicts different participants discussing the themes of love, loss, and memory in relation to ideas of nuclear family, same-sex marriage, and alternative queer kinship structures. Each participant was filmed in a different space, sitting at a dinner table, but they were edited to appear as if one person is speaking and the other two are listening. During the filming process, I asked participants: “Now, can you sit in silence?” and “Can you look at the camera, then to your left and to your right?” They were distant from each other, yet listening, and the editing process brought all this together to create a relationality and continuity across the participants.
SH: In Souvenir, so much of the footage is without dialogue, a lot of pauses in speech. Mineko and Jim do not say much, we were quite minimal and intentional with each word, and with what is shared or withheld. In recollecting a traumatic event, there is a temporal gap in looking back at one’s experiences, yet there are no words that adequately represent this experience. So silence can say more, and for us, this silence was also about accounting for our differing positions. We worked closely with Mineko, but we haven't experienced what she experienced, so it was important to account for this lack of understanding, and the gaps in knowledge. When Mineko is not speaking, what we hear instead is the soundscore, which was designed by the artist Sindhu Thirumalaisamy. The sound source comes from data records from one of the oldest analogue tide gauges in the world, which is located in Cascais, Portugal where we did the AiR 351 residency in 2022. Sindhu turned these visual data sets–that looked like waves on a graph—into sonic waves for the sound design, as a way to reflect the lingering presence of the ocean’s activity, its unpredictability, and rebellion.
Also, our research and filming process involved a lot of standing in silence, sitting in silence, listening to the landscape–the sound of the water as it hit rocks or moved over the hard shells of barnacles on the coast.
JD: Would you say that accepting silence as maybe not just a way to help the conversation go further but as a silence where you may never know what lies behind, is also a way of caring for the other person? Being like “I won’t ask you what is behind this silence, but I listen to it, and I am here to acknowledge it.” Would you say that it is true about your work?
OB: Silence is an invitation to listen more closely. How does one empathize with something that one has never experienced? Perhaps one can come closest in silence, in meditation where you are transported into a space that is not yours, where even the sounds of, let’s say, barnacles are speaking in an audible language.
JD: What I really liked about the work is this kind of weird magical thing that happens: she is named “three cats” and she survives and sees a cat. It feels almost like she accepts it as symbolic, a case where the figure of the animal helps you go through traumatic things. The cat feels like an exterior, non-human force that came to help her. How would you relate to that in your work knowing that in the first exhibition of Souvenir, you decided to make seven cats? So it really is about the cat. What is at play with this symbol or figure of the cat? It feels like it has deeper and more expansive meaning beyond her initial memory.
OB: We were thinking that the names given to us, or the names we choose can serve as a precursor for the future, or it's something you identify with and layer meaning onto, and there’s a creative component to this process that accumulates over time. Mineko has always felt very connected to animals. When she goes to work, she gets all dressed up and puts some cat food in her purse for the neighbor's cat, which she calls Hariko (meaning ‘bridge’ in Japanese). Mineko also happens to live around the corner from quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s house where the infamous Shrödinger’s Cat thought experiment took place back in 1935.
SH: In her memory recollection, the cat offers us a moment of cross-species affinity, but it also stands as this seed of possibility within an impossible experience, such as the experience of a natural disaster, of surviving the tsunami, and of moving towards a future after losing a loved one to it. Cats hate water and are uncontrollable in many ways, and so encountering this cat in the water–marking the moment of survival–has magic to it. In the research process, especially as we were working in the field of marine biology, interviewing scientists, and looking over data sets and distanced quantifications of the event, we thought about the symbolism of the cat as the unknown and the uncontrollable.
JD: Yes, what I like is that in the work we see two stories colliding and Mineko’s story is part of a bigger, maybe more uncontrollable whole. It feels that this is present in your body of work. There is the personal and the body that is connected to a larger whole. It is not even about connecting it to politics or society, but rather destiny and natural elements. Is that a way to find belonging into the world?
SH: At POUSH in Paris, where you screened the work, we presented it as a one-channel installation. At Kunsthaus Zürich, where it is up now, it is two-channel with one channel depicting a very different perspective on the aftermath of the tsunami. We worked with a beachcomber named John Anderson who has a barn full of oceanic debris, many of which are from the 2011 tsunami. The video is a slow scanning shot of thousands of plastic objects on the shore of the Pacific Coast that closely documents these items from smallest to largest size. It is a meditative and slow work, a single take, which looks at the tsunami from the perspective of the objects that rafted across the Pacific Ocean, and that have a very personal relationship to the people who experienced the destruction. There’s an intimacy and a lived history that is present on the surface of the objects–stained and dented from the travel, and from being used by different people. We used a drone that was flying very close to the ground to film these objects.
We filmed with various image-making technologies throughout the project in general, including a drone, underwater camera, cell phone, Sony DSLR, all of which have different relationships to the body. The question of belonging, movement, and the knowledgement of the material world are captured in the ways that each technological apparatus works on a dramatically different scale–from a drone scanning the surface of a used toothbrush to a cell-phone looking into a microscope to study a barnacle shell and an underwater camera moving over the surface of sand in water. In interweaving these various scales together, we were interested in meditating on the everyday within experiences of ecological disaster, and personal trauma, and loss, and seeing a different perspective in the close study of a tiny marine creature or a disposable object.
JD: You are also allowing each person who sees this work to have their own conclusion about it.
OB: Exactly.
JD: Speaking of those toothbrushes that go through the sea and plastic pollution, your works Epitaph for Family and Magic Hour and even The Rebel Body were very much personal. Now with Souvenir, and also with your new research about glaciers, you start connecting the personal and the body to natural elements and science. When, how and why did this shift occur?
OB: In the last few years, my research and practice employs a trans-feminist lens to the issue of ecological care. I have moved away from the concept of family, which was the central theme of Epitaph for Family. In my recent work in collaboration with Shoghig, in The Rebel Body and Souvenir, we are trying to amplify other affinity lines, through a close focus on material life-worlds and the alternative knowledge(s) that exist in the landscapes that hold us. We are paying attention to relations of intimacy and interdependency between human and animal life. While honing in on environmental concerns, we began collaborating with scientists as a means to understand the natural world from a different perspective, and connect a scientific approach to poetics and speculative thought, through creative lens and sound based strategies. In my current project, Belly of a Glacier, I return to the place of my childhood and connect my memories of the ice, and the sensorial experience of being surrounded by snow and the cold, to scientific approaches. I explore an ancient ice archive in relation to deep time, queer world-building, and the future of climate change.
JD: The fact that the body becomes the glacier, the body becomes the water… This feels almost like a kind of reconciliation. Because the body has trauma, the glacier has trauma, the water has trauma, even though a lot of the artistic choices are linked to science in your works –like the shimmers on water that are actually a way of measuring the depth of the ocean–, this parallel allows those to become a form of meditation. You transform science into something sensitive and meditative. Is that a correct way of seeing your work?
OB: Yes, glaciers as well as human bodies are in constant flux, aging, vulnerable, and dependent in expansive ways. Our practices are, in differing ways, informed by the notion of trans-corporality, which challenges a linear account of time and relations, and the need to present experiences through a consumable representative account. I think about this from a trans perspective and Shoghig approaches it through the lens of queer diaspora and dispersion. At the intersection of these ways of thinking, which come from our lived experiences, we try to bypass the demand for legibility–even formally in terms of how a story is narrated, whether it is resolved or not–and to allow for the nuances and paradoxes that are important to our lives.
In Souvenir, we thought about how bodies of water hold trauma but also how they hold memory and information, and a creative impulse too. While filming, we traveled to Cascais, Portugal to work with Jose Campos, who takes care of the oldest tide gauge (a wave monitoring machine). In addition, we met with Josh Willis who works at NASA, who explained how camera technologies in space monitor wave activity by photographing the movement of sun glitter on the ocean's surface. After these encounters and research, we invited Sindhu to collaborate on the sound design and to sonify the data visualization of ocean waves from the tide gauge in Cascais, turning visual waves that you see in the film into sound waves for the film’s score.
JD: So you are colliding the analytic and evidentiary facts with sensorial experience, and creating intimacy between these two seemingly distant approaches. How did you achieve it?
SH: We wanted to experiment with, challenge, and distort scientific image-making and data monitoring strategies to develop a more affective vocabulary that can speak to environmental and personal loss. Instead of statistics, we wanted to create a mood, a feeling of both loss and resilience amidst environmental trauma. We are also depicting multi-species life-forms that persist through harmful conditions, exploring how bringing two stories together across human and marine species can offer a new understanding of scale and positions, and ultimately of resilience.
JD: There is something about this slow-paced movie that goes against all beliefs that, if you go through a traumatic event, you might be chaotic. But maybe you just slow down, staying still in the face of adversity. Like a tree, anchored.
OB: In Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), there’s a part in that book where she describes a state of grief, shortly after the death of her husband. She writes of feeling like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean: alive, there, present, yet surrounded by water, no movement, just the feeling of being stuck. I referenced this passage in a title for another exhibition, Playing Submarine (2021). In Souvenir, we thought about the surface of the water as a primary site–both in terms of the edges of the water that touch land to create a liminal shifting space and in terms of the small barely-visible waves on the water’s surface that capture the sun’s reflection, creating a glimmering landscape that we all are so used to seeing. It’s on the water’s surface that these objects and coastal species rafted on and where Mineko found herself. So we focused on this space as a site of information, movement, support, and play. Our editor Katrin Ebersohn was incredible at shaping the pacing of the film, oscillating between moments where you receive information from either Mineko or Jim, as if one’s head is peeking out of water, to other moments that feel more submerged, where the ambience moves to the foreground.
JD: Talking about Joan Didion is a beautiful conclusion. Even in Blue Nights: A Memoir (2011), she keeps repeating the same souvenir. It is this exercise in slowness, slow-paced writing, re-writing the same thing … This repetition and pacing heals her. There is indeed something in your works that is really close to this. It comes back to our discussion about silence. The less you say, the deeper the meaning, the deeper the silence, therefore the deeper the evocation for anyone else to feel that they are part of you and part of your story.
OB: Yes, we return to the idea of silence as an invitation for active listening. It also opens up a space where multiple meanings can exist, where questions can arise or tensions can build and reverberate. It’s a pause from speech that amplifies the space between two people, holding them or drawing them together, a space of relation. I think pauses in dialogue also attune us to our other senses, to our bodies, which is where healing can take place.
SH: Exactly. In Souvenir, Mineko’s moments of silence are when we, as listeners, can feel her loss and sit with it, give it the space to spread out, without having to quickly resolve it or make a clear or digestible meaning out of it. By being in this space of grief, we honor it for both its difficulty and its life-force, and for how profound of an experience it is to know another person, to love them, see them go, and to linger in the ongoing aftermath of their impact on your life.