Scent Line of a Moving Mountain, Digital film 17.59 minutes, 2025
Scent Line on a Moving Mountain attempts to embody the felt knowledge exchanged between an indigenous Ainu elder, Ms Kane Kumagai, non-human beings, and myself through learning Samani Ainu cooking, taught to me by Ms Kumagai. Ms Kumagai is known to be one of the last elders who hold ‘traditional’ knowledge in Hokkaido, Japan. She prefers to call this knowledge ‘my mother’s everyday’. Her cooking process includes foraging – knowing how to take care of natural environment - communication with non-human-beings, using physical sense instead of having a written recipe, sharing food with her family and community. Ms Kumagai’s approach is an indigenous method for living and inhabiting the planet in sustainable ways that is no longer practiced on everyday basis as city-centric Japanese way of living has dominated Ainu people’s lives for past 150 years.
During my time with Ms Kumagai between 2019-2023, we collected tales and songs from her ancestors. As young mother, Ms Kumagai observed how Japanese anthropology professors used to come to her home to record her mother singing Ainu songs while her father was appreciated as the last Ainu matagi (a bear hunter). She started carrying her sound recorder wherever her family got together and sang songs and danced. It was a time when people avoided saying a word ‘Ainu’ or speaking in their own language as these would have resulted in discrimination or bullying. In this work, Ms Kumagai allowed me to include her recording of her family celebrating a day when her brother caught a bear. Her family naturally started dancing and singing happily for themselves, not for audiences.
Recording the Samani Ainu cooking that Ms Kumagai wishes to share with future generations also resists forgetting a facet of Samaini Ainu community. I offer values askance from social norms shaped by colonial, imperialistic, misogynistic, and capitalist modes of society.
This work was filmed in 2023 when I was in my early pregnancy. I have been filming the physical development of my pregnancy which has introduced me to a new perspective about the ecological, social, and cultural environment where I live in London. With enhanced physical senses and struggling to cope with air, water, light, and sound pollution, I explore how pregnancy and motherhood contribute to thinking about the ecological future. I seek to show how the practice of art can observe, unfold, work with, and share in a compassionate way a felt knowledge that is part of the human world.
