慶應義塾大学アート・センター　Keio University Art Center

──Ko-chan, stop taking a video of your mother's death! What good does it do! Is this your art? Stop filming the death of people for TV! I can't watch it anymore… Never film people’s deaths ever again. Saying that, she shed tears. 
──No, auntie. We can only experience my mother’s death once I said.
[...]
Let’s pull down that memorial portrait from the Buddist altar and start making a video for the altar right away! 

──Ko Nakajima: "Ko Nakajima's Documentary Episode 9: Make your own 'My Life Video' with the life and death ceremonies that occur in your life." [Publication details unknown. NAK0402]

Ko Nakajima's MY LIFE is an unfinished work, the production of which began in 1971 and is still ongoing almost 50 years later. It has been packaged several times so far. Representative editions include the 1976, 1982, 1992, 2012, 2014 and 2019 editions. It is a black-and-white movies focused on the family, initiated by Nakajima's father's death and his son's birth. His work was first exhibited in 1977 at the Kumamoto Kumanichi Gallery. It is a work in which a vast amount of recorded footage, with the family as the central subject, is condensed to several tens of minutes and divided into two screens. Nakajima is an artist as well as an archivist who produces a vast amount of material that is folded into the unfinished "MY LIFE".

As one model for the archive, in the "Art Archive Special Lecture (Autumn Semester)," we observed and analyzed Ko Nakajima's "MY LIFE. Based on this, a workshop was held where each student produced a “MY LIFE” video. During this event, we plan to watch “MY LIFE” created by students, receive feedback from Nakajima, and then proceed to discuss archives afterwards.

What position does "MY LIFE" hold in art history and media history? Furthermore, in the present era where video has become widespread and essential in our daily lives, what does it mean to create an archive through video? What can an archive do, and what are the possibilities at the core of video and its archive?

* This event will be held privately, however, the video of this event will be released later.
** This event is related to the Support Program to Promote Archives of Media Arts 2023: Digitizing and Cataloging of Performance and Exhibition Video Records from the post-1970s.
*** The Keio University Art Center's "Seminar: Art Archival Research" aims to learn about the methodology of thinking, not just as a storage of things, through specific artistic practices. 

Part 1: 10:45-12:15 - Screening and review of "MY LIFE" video works by students
Part 2: 12:15-13:15 - Discussion on NEW "MY LIFE" and video and archive.