Making dolls may be an art, though it's mainly a craft that can provide endless hours of fun. Yet quite often it all depends from the type of doll you're making. This video by Fritz Schumann tells a very touching and emotional story that could be read in different ways. "The Valley of Dolls" is indeed the story of Ayano Tsukimi who lives in Nagoro, a village in eastern Iya on Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan.
There are 37 people living there and Tsukimi has replaced the dead ones or those who have left with life sized dolls that look like the former residents. She has then scattered them around the village: some of them are working in a plot of land, others wait for the bus, while the school that became known for being attended only by two students, is now crowded with her dolls and also boasts a headmaster.
Moving, nostalgic and at times quite scary, Tsukimi's dolls represent a way to preserve the memory of somebody, but they implicitly look at further and deeper issues, including the destruction of villages and the transformation of specific areas and of society as well with people moving to more densely populated places with the prospect of getting better jobs.
From an artistic perspective the dolls are the product of Tsukimi's talent for craft and they could be considered as perfect size specific installations, but they are also part of the architectural façade of the village: they are now populating an area where real people were living and working for the dam and the company that Tsukimi mentions at the very beginning of the video. The dolls indirectly become also tangible presences and physical ghosts of tragedies spanning from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and consequent Fukushima disaster.
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