Sakura Koretsune is a visual artist who seeks to reweave the stories between humans and cetaceans through embroidered images on textiles with texts in the form of journals and poems. In this presentation, she will present her publication project "Ordinary Whales", which is a series of small booklets containing both visual works and texts, on which she has worked since 2016. Inspired by the notion of "super whale" proposed by anthropologist Arne Kalland, she has been trying to reweave rich stories of whales in different regions to find stories that counterbalance images of the "super whale" created by media and the imagination of people who are not close to living cetaceans.
For the past six years, Koretsune has visited various places that have relationships with whales and dolphins. These places are both inside and outside Japan: Ishinomaki and Kesennuma (Miyagi, Japan), Taiji (Wakayama, Japan), Abashiri and Tomakomai (Hokkaido, Japan), Point Hope (Alaska, USA), Shinnecock Nation (New York, USA), and more. As she traveled and studied local beliefs toward whales in Japan and compared them with other places overseas, she realized that the reality is more complicated than the image of "Japan as a whaling country" suggests.
Sakura Koretsune will join the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of the University of Oslo as a guest researcher for one year with the support of the "Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists" of The Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan. She will participate in the ERC-funded research project "Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia”. At this seminar, she will introduce her past works and outline how her view toward human-cetacean relationships has changed through the years of my research and creation. She will also present her plans for her year in Oslo.
Bio: Sakura Koretsune is a visual artist originally from Ondo-cho, Kure city, Hiroshima, Japan. She studied Native Arts of Alaska, Painting, and Sculpture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 2010. She studied at Tohoku University of Art & Design and received a master’s degree in Localized Design in 2017. Koretsune focuses on whaling, fishing, and maritime religions in her fieldwork. She represents stories related to cetaceans with essays and embroidery works. She is the publisher of a small press “Ordinary Whales”.