The Art of Sushi and Sake
What's New With Bruce
Artist Bruce Yonemoto talks about his recent work
By Nancy Uyemura
Most recently, I have been developing video projects in South America. Qoricancha and the Sacred Songs of Cusco, is a project being developed with students, video makers and artists at the Bartolome de Las Casas Center (CBC) in the city of Cusco, Peru. The Bartolomé de Las Casas Center (CBC) was founded in 1974 by a small team of scholars passionate about the Andean world. They were three sociologists and one agronomist. As a point of departure they set for themselves an ambitious objective: to advance the study and the awareness of the Andean world with its historical, cultural, social, linguistic, and economic complexities. The Center turned into a place of reference, debates, and of extremely active interchange. For the past two years I have been actively working with the CBC in my capacity as an invited artist/teacher.
The new opera theater media project engages the Andean Peruvian culture through the recreation of “lost” Peruvian sacred songs. Sung in Quechua (a native Peruvian dialect) they were written in the 17th century during Spanish domination. Haunting musicality eerily evokes early European opera. This is music capable of penetrating the spirit in a universally expressive way. SONIA CCAHUANA, who with her musicians generates a force field of feeling in Cusco, to propel an original multi-media performance work. The site of production will be the most sacred of ancient Incan sites, QORICANCHA where once the most exquisite Incan stone work supported extraordinary treasures of gold and precious gems. The Santo Domingo, an uninspired baroque church was built on the walls of this precious “Temple of the Sun” and the forced application of modern cultures onto the shattered remnants of ancient ones is the theme of our piece. Only the holiest religious symbol of the empire, a solid gold disc, disappeared just before the conquest and could not be destroyed. It remains lost to this day, and this mystery, central to Andean culture, is one of the many that we will explore in our piece where we will create a scenario to expand the theme of cultural appropriation- even extending to the 20th century mythic Peruvian, YMA SUMAC whose upbringing, and more importantly, whose MUSICIANSHIP are a direct link to this culture. Her infamous multi-octave singing resonates from the HEART of these sacred songs and her descent into “kitsch” reveals the treacherous juxtaposition of modern and ancient cultures. Theater and Opera director David Schweitzer and I will develop and direct this new multi-media opera theater piece in both Peru and the United States.
Presently I am also working with theorist, July Carson on “Imagine the End of the World at the End of the Earth”, an installation, which focuses on the last growing glacier in the world. This video project shot in Patagonia, explores the uncanny convergence of three facts specific to Argentina: The last living and growing glacier; the last living Lacanian (psychoanalytic) practice; and the literary tradition of Jorges Luis Borges, which bridges the two. This project, in both form and content, continues my recent video work that allegorically explores issues of cultural disapora and colonization through the two pronged trajectories of popular culture and “high” art. At base is an interrogation of the documentarian’s ability to tell the “truth” of culture through objective analysis alone.
My work as a video and media installation artist, educator, writer and curator (many of the works done in collaboration with my brother, Norman) began in the mid 1970’s. The body of single channel video work was created from 1976 to the late 1980’s examined the effects of the mass media on our perceptions of personal identity (sexual, ethnic, and political), romantic love, melodramas and soap operas to TV commercials and the electronic super text (the ultimate products of Hollywood’s search for audience identification and manipulation), desired to manipulate audiences while making them aware of that manipulation. Since 1989, my work has been individually exploring experimental cinema and video art within the context of installation, photography and sculpture. I am currently Chair of Studio Art at UC Irvine.
Bruce Yonemoto is continually busy with creative projects and these are just two of the most recent ones. He shows his work internationally as well as here throughout the U.S.
He also happens to be a connoisseur of sushi and sake. Thanks Bruce for your commitment to your art and the community at large.
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