An exhibition-style theatre of a voice-less city

Masataka Matsuda and his company marebito theatre company have been working on projects about cities, including "Hiroshima-Nagasaki", a series about the two places that both have the experience of a nuclear attack. His documentary play "Voiceprints City - Letters to Father", co-produced by F/T09 Spring, was concerned with the relationship between the writer's hometown of Nagasaki and his father. He has continued his influential work with "Park City", about the revitalization of Hiroshima through the creation of a central park area.

For the third installment in the "Hiroshima-Nagasaki" series Matsuda will look beyond the borders of Japan. He became interested in Hapcheon, a town in Korean known as "the other Hiroshima" as many A-Bomb victims from Hiroshima are even now still living there. He found a foreignness and complexity in the Hiroshima bombing and its victims, an event which is ostensibly uniquely Japanese.

The performance will consist of the voices, sounds, texts and footage Matsuda took on his field trip and research in Hiroshima and Hapcheon, transforming the Jiyugaku Myonichikan into a museum. He wants to make those who experienced the event the performers, and turn their very persons into an exhibition. Performance usually takes place in a certain time, watched from a seat. Matsuda will dispense with this system; during the period of the performance, the audience can come and go as they please, choosing which works to watch and for how long. Aside from its innovative subject matter, it is an experiment in the theatrical experience and the relationship between an audience and a production.

"Hiroshima-Hapcheon: Doubled Cities in Exhibition" will put the image of the two cities into the limelight. Not only do they share a past but Japan and Korea are also now moving forward in new political, economic and diplomatic ways. The audience will learn from their painful history and, from there, view wider contemporary issues.

Hapcheon

Hapcheon is located in the north of Kyongsang-namdo in South Korea, a small town in the mountains about two hours by car from Pusan. Since the start of the twentieth century up until the War, many people from the area re-located to Hiroshima, and there became victims of the A-Bomb. (In fact, some fifty thousand of the four hundred and twenty thousand victims of the Bomb were from the Korean peninsular.) Returning home after the War they settled in Hapcheon, and the town has since become known as "the other Hiroshima" or "the Korean Hiroshima". Today the Korean Red Cross operates a welfare center for victims of the Bomb, where about 110 people stay.

Notice

In the F/T10 flyer it was mistakenly written that Hapcheon became "a second home for many Japanese A-bomb victims". The correct text should be that Hapcheon is the home to most of the Korean A-bomb victims who were living in Hiroshima during the Second World War. We sincerely apologize for this mistake and the inconveniences it might have caused.