Memory of the giraffe

The conversation by telephone of two women is presented, but what the audience can see is only English subtitle on the black screen. When the one talks, the subtitle shows up on the top of the screen, and when the other talks, it does on the bottom. You can’t see any images of these two people, but this conversation is shown very lively with the rhythm of subtitles on the screen.

Their conversation starts with one question. One woman asks her friend if she remembers the little thing, what happened 10 years ago in their high school days. At that time, they found a vine tree at the corner of the school accidentally, and they both said it looked like a giraffe, and they promised each other to keep this memory as a secret. When one woman asks her friend about that, she tries to trace back in memory. However their conversation goes awkward because this is a pretty sudden theme and moreover now they are not any longer close friends.

This work is based on ’Exoticism’ and ’Eternal yearning for a faraway place’. My intention is to make the audience picture other imaginative images with the Asian speaking, the subtitle, and the black screen. The difference between the speaking and the subtitle(especially the linguistic difference) will work as a good device. One of the reasons I chose this story, even if it is just my intimate experience, is that it looked like a giraffe. Giraffes have long necks, eat leaves, and are very big animals you can see in picture books. Because of these facts, I thought this could be a good subject matter which would stir up exotic illusion.