Sixty Stories, Six Thousand Miles Apart

The chapter records a series of fieldwork notes created during a period of research for an ongoing collaborative project called "Zawawa: The Sound of Sugarcane in the Wind" which responds to the multiple aftermaths of the Battle of Okinawa and the subsequent occupations of the archipelago by US military.

The fieldnotes encompass interviews, audio recording activities, engagements with archival materials, audio editing, film-making and dissemination strategies. The span of reported activities is intended to problematise the anthropological record in terms of its assumed contemporaneity and to explore how the field projects a broad reach, incorporating not just the traditional study site but wider research contexts as well as locations of artistic production and dissemination (such as the studio, the edit suite, the festival), and places of transit and family life.

Each dated note is exactly 100 words in length, an artificial constraint designed to point up the aritifice involved in the fieldwork process, something that connects the chapter to the wider themes of the book "Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practiec for Art and Art-based Research".