A body of 48
Photo: Teo Swee An
ABOUT
"A body of 48" (2025)
My late grandmother wrote a journal about loss of her first husband by atomic bomb on 15th August 1945. She left me many memory and I wished to explore how culture, hometown, history and memory are accumulated in one’s body. The work aims to challenge to interpret the invisible yet profound one’s cultural and historical identity created over generations through movement and media images.
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In 2025, my 48 years old body is here right now.
In 1977, I was born and
In 1971, my mother married my father when she was 23.
In 1948, my grandmother remarried and my mother was born.
In 1945, my grandmother was 26 years old and her first husband was 33 when he passed away.
If he didn't get killed by the bomb, my grandmother didn't remarry
my mother was not born.
and I am not here, in front of you right now.
My body is not here in front of you.
80 years after that day
this dream-like history is unlike a dream.
(A poetry added to the performance written by Taka Takiguchi)
ARTIST NOTE
Eighty years later I find myself in Bangkok making work to reckon with my grandmother. Her life — and therefore mine — was shaped by wartime violence: her first husband, a police officer, died because of the war, and that loss cast a long shadow across generations.
This project tells the story of my grandmother, a 26-year-old woman from the countryside who had little awareness of the wider world she was living in. Her despair, felt even forty years after his death, made me confront the particular way war damages civilians and the quiet, lasting cost of that damage.
My intention is to use my body as a site of memory — to examine how historical events have been carried and moulded within me — and to share the legacy of sacrifice left by our ancestors. The work is an act of witnessing: tender, unsettled, and insistently present.
I would like to pay my condolence to and commemorate all deceased spirits of the wars, conflicts and genocides past and present.
No more Hiroshima
No more Nagasaki
No more wars
ー
80年後、私はバンコクで祖母の送った人生と向き合うための作品を制作しています。祖母の人生、そして私自身の人生もまた、戦争の暴力によって形づくられました。彼女の最初の夫（警察官）は原爆によって命を奪われ、その喪失は世代を超えて長い影を落としました。
このプロジェクトは、当時26歳で、統制下の中、世界で起きていた出来事をほとんど知らずに田舎で暮らしていた祖母の物語を伝えるものです。夫を亡くした彼女の深い絶望は、この話を語り始めた40年を経てもなお続いており、その姿は戦争が一市民をどのように傷つけ、静かでありながらも長く残る痛みをもたらすのかを私に突きつけました。
制作意図として、私は自らの身体を記憶の場として用い、歴史的な出来事がどのように私の内に受け継がれ、形づくられてきたのかを見つめ、祖先たちが私たちに残した犠牲の遺産を共有することです。この作品は、優しくも揺らぎ、しかし強く現在に存在し続ける「証言」という行為と考えています。
過去、そして現在も続く戦争・紛争・虐殺で亡くなったすべての魂に哀悼の意をここに表します。
ヒロシマは繰り返してはいけない
ナガサキは繰り返してはいけない
戦争と殺し合いは悲しみしか生みません
CREATORS
Written by
Chizue Shigeta
Edited and performed by
Taka Takiguchi
PRODUCTION HISTORY
Sydney Festival of Death of Dying
23 November 2025
Sydney, Australia
Showing Performance
26 August 2025
Malacca, Malaysia
as a part of MAP Festival
First exhibition (digital work element)
7 August 2025
Poh Chang Academy of Arts
Bangkok, Thailand
REVIEWS
“…grimy pool tiles, frangipani, a bee, a masked or mummy-like figure, a ball of string, and Taka’s body layered and re-layered through shadows and piano sound. The imagery forms its own internal language.” - Australian Stage
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
"A body of 48" was created on 15th August 2025 with the support of Poh Chang Academy of Artsas part of 19th Poh Chang Internatinal Art Festival and Art Workshop in Thailand 2025
LINKS
Original journal （Japanese only）
Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims
