Pacific Pacific - TOMOKO SAUVAGE

Tomoko Sauvage presents Pacific Pacific: a video documentation of new musical experiments on the theme of empathic ties born around the peace movement in the Pacific Ocean. Sauvage takes, as a starting point, Okinawa, a double US / Japanese colony and the primary base for US military forces during the Vietnam War. In particular, Sauvage is inspired by the solidarity formed among American soldiers and activists, local Okinawans as well as mainland Japanese in anti-war protests and in Black liberation movements of that period. Navigating the Pacific from Okinawa to Guam, passing by Fukushima and French Polynesia while plunging into local yet globally interconnected indigenous cosmologies, Sauvage collects and samples voices and soundscapes from the complex layers of geopolitical realities and utopian dreams.

Over the past decade, Sauvage has been making electro-acoustic music by transforming an ancient Indian instrument into a new hybrid « natural synthesizer » which combines water, ceramics and electronics. Her long-term artistic research of water guides her exploration of the musical and metaphoric power of this material: healing, purifying, filtering or diffusing. Sauvage weaves archived narratives in her tuned water, incorporating shells, stones and other ephemera washed up by the ocean to imagine a new form of protest music which celebrates connectedness.

Tomoko Sauvage is a Paris-based Japanese musician and artist. Through primordial elements augmented by technology, enlivened by ritualistic yet playful gestures, Sauvage’s work contemplates, tunes and connects both the material and the immaterial. Her latest album Musique Hydromantique alludes to hydromancy, the ancient method of divination by means of water. Under the form of performance, installation and composition, Sauvage’s work is presented worldwide at international festivals and art institutions as well as via radios and publishers.

https://o-o-o-o.org/