Ariko S. Ikehara

24 April 2021
7pm—8.30pm (SGT)

To register please email:
natalie@greyprojects.org

︎︎︎view other webinars

Ar(t)chive functions as both artwork and archive. The Map of Teruya is conceptualized as a living archive of Teruya, a place formerly known as the Black District that existed during the US military occupation on Okinawa islands. The map weaves the meta-narratives of history, personal stories, and the gaps or questions that emerge from this. This interplay in the map as performative an object that solicits the viewers’ motion into action: filling the gap of what is missing on the map, and translates the personal MiXtory (history, story, mystery) into material forms, i.e., object, event, performance, into an archive. Based on the theories of third space and praxis of performance art, the hybrid method is an experimental and experiential form that produces the nonbinary, the difference, and decolonial knowledge.

Ariko S. Ikehara is Director at Koza X MiXtopia Research Center in Okinawa. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Osaka University (2017-19). Her peer-reviewed publications include “Champurū Text: Postwar Okinawan Writing,” in Beyond American Occupation: Race and Agency in Okinawa, 1945-2015 (2017), and “Third Space as Decolonial Con/Text: Okinawa’s American Champurū,” in Transnational Asia: An Online Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall 2016). Since 1995, she has published essays and articles in Japanese about Teruya in Okinawan journals and local Okinawan newspapers. She is currently working on two book projects.