Watch Takami Nakamoto’s “Where Is Mawt” Video:
Today we watch an extraordinary video collaboration between the architect/musician Takami Nakamoto and the filmmaker Maurice Mikkers. The two originally met at REUSE, an art festival promoting “environmental sustainability and community participation” in Kuwait. Mikkers project “Imaginarium of Tears” had captured Nakamoto’s imagination but it wasn’t until a personal tragedy in the musician’s life occurred this year that he decided to reach out to the artist regarding a collaboration. Mikkers reports that the musician contacted him via email on April 16th to report that his friend Mathieu Trudel, a Canadian illustrator and animator had gone missing and that family and friends feared the worst. These fears were confirmed in May when the 37-year old’s body was found on Petrie Island in Ontario, Canada, the result of an apparent suicide. Recognizing the parallels between Nakamoto’s grief and his own “Imaginarium of Tears” project the pair met immediately in The Hague to begin discussing their audio/visual collaboration, “Where Is Mawt“. Using Mikkers film work with the Nikon Diaphot TMD microscope as their basis, the two set about capturing to video the crystallization of Nakamoto’s tears. More than just a metaphor, Mikkers explains,
“Over time Takami shed 2 to 3ml of tears in total that were then stored in Eppendorf reaction tubes. Small drops (1 to 5mm) were placed on several microscopic slides. These slides were then placed directly under the microscope and recordings were made while the crystallization process took place (between 5 and 30 minutes). We made more than 50 recordings. The tears could only be used for a small period of time (max 2 hours), it was necessary for Takami to “produce” more tears once the reaction tube was empty or when we exceeded the time period of 2 hours”.
Shot on a Canon 5D using a dark field illumination technique, the resulting images seem to pulse in forward and backward motion before finally coalescing into feathered filigree by the video’s end, and combined with Nakamoto’s stuttering and sublimated electronics, “Where Is Mawt” is an amazingly moving tribute to a lost friend.
