Dead Letter Room

Dead Letter Room is a transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet and hibakusha, Hara Tamiki. The project, which gathers fabulative texts and original and archival photographs, lingers in the gaps of language, geography and historical time.

Dead Letter Room is a transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet Hara Tamiki (原民喜, 1905–1951), known for his slender output of poetry and prose during the prewar and immediate postwar periods. An extraordinarily sensitive and elusive writer, Hara is most popularly admired for authoring Summer Flowers, a narrative first-person account of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Central to Dead Letter Room is a series of thirteen fabulative letters, penned between the artist (“AT”) and the personified remains of Hara’s literary archive (“H”). The fictive texts are narrated across a disordered temporal and spatial landscape, and they draw on unofficial or illegitimate translations of Hara’s work. The undelivered correspondence crosses themes of history, memory, spectatorship and language, and contends with "ficting" and "facting" as interdependent historiographic processes. The correspondence triangulates with reproduced photographs from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey–conducted by the U.S. military in the postwar Pacific–and with original photographs of revisited sites in contemporary Japan.

Full Correspondence: read here

Artist's Essay on Hara Tamiki: read here