Dead Letter Room — Brookline Arts Center

Dead Letter Room
— Allie Tsubota

January 20 —March 21, 2024 at Brookline Arts Center

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.

Dead Letter Room is comprised of three interdependent parts: 1) a reproduction of a post-atomic archive–the United States Strategic Bombing Survey–created by the U.S. military in Occupied Japan; 2) a fictive, transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet and hibakusha, Hara Tamiki; and 3) a photographic search for (or "survey" of) the material, literary and spectral traces of Hara's life, conducted by the artist in 2022.

Together, the elements of Dead Letter Room engage in a politics of mediation and exchange, flowing across disciplines, languages, nations and temporalities. The project is preoccupied with recovering life disappeared by the state and its archives, and to do so, it looks to the pregnant breaks between language, light and atomic time.

© Allie Tsubota

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 it speculates within the fractures of atomic time. 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.

Exhibition Items

© Allie Tsubota The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theater, 1945 In October 1945, a team of U.S. Air Force photographers arrived in Occupied Japan to document the efficacy of Allied bombing on Japanese soil, including the magnitude of damage sustained by atomic-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over several months, the team of photographers captured over 8,000 photographs, recording what was visible of the wrecked Japanese war economy and the masses of civilians left dead, disfigured, or disappeared. The survey, titled the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), was critical to the United States’ postwar intelligence gathering, and it remains one the most extensive visual records of the ruins of nuclear war.

© Allie Tsubota Letters to/from H Penned between March–December 2022, and is a central to Dead Letter Room. The correspondence is written in English and has been kindly translated into Japanese by YAMADA Kyle and TAMURA Kanoko.

© Allie Tsubota Contemporary Sites:
Hiroshima & Tokyo, Japan, 2022 A photographic search for (or “survey” of) the material and spectral traces of Hara Tamiki’s life, and an inquiry into post-imperial and postwar erasures in the Japanese landscape. The series of photographs distantly echoes the language of the USSBS, as a visual index of absence-as-presence, disappearance, and the aftermath.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theater, 1945

Image Courtesy of U.S. National Archives

Image Credit: Cameran Schwarz

Image Courtesy of U.S. National Archives

Letters to/from H

© Allie Tsubota

Contemporary Sites:
Hiroshima & Tokyo, Japan, 2022

Image Credit: Cameran Schwarz

Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her projects join photography, video, photographic and filmic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and presently teaches at Parsons School of Design and The College of New Jersey.

www.allietsubota.com

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