About the Center
With a five-year plan, the center's goal is to build a foundation upon which the next generation of creators can build and expand to the next generation. Each year is designated in one of the three areas: year-one, academic, year-two, art, and year-three, community. While each year is designed for one of the programs, they work all together in tandem and as a unit. The plan for the fourth and the fifth year is to enhance and grow these three programming areas with mentoring, training and collaboration. This will allow us to pass the torch on to the next generation of creative entrepreneurs who will take charge of the future by thinking outside the box.
Who:
Everyday people, things, and objects. Experienced is embodied knowledge.
What/when/where :
At Koza X MiXtopia Research Center, the objective is to develop a set of postwar archives of the Koza Crossroads which includes five municipalities of Koza cities: Shiromae, Yoshihara, Yaejima, Miyazato, and Teruya. Impacted by the war and occupation, these districts became an epicenter of Okinawa's economy serving as bustling and hustling places of trade, business, and market. The Crossroads also became a place of mixed racial/ethnic/cultural/linguistic/national geographies.
How:
The center will employ a pedagogy of MiXtory (history, story, mystery) and yuntakuview, an informal interview style that brings together an element of Okinawa's everyday chatting (yuntaku) and the academic method of interview. Both pedagogies emerged as a method/technique akin to performance art/life, during Ariko Ikehara's dissertation fieldwork in Koza.
Performance art/life as a method requires a process of exploration that leads to the discovery of new information and directs us to see things that we would not see otherwise if we follow only what we already see/know, The center considers important both the scientific and humanistic approaches to research, however, the role of the process - chance, word of mouth, connections, and relationships in everyday life in gathering information - is imperative.
Through the process, we find boundless creativity, imagination, and freedom and the value of the lived experiences that are co-produced in collaboration and partnerships with others.
Why:
First, we learn from this history how people lived in a mixed community in which race, ethnicity, class, gender, language became secondary to people's will to live under the extreme conditions of the aftermath of war and the occupation. Second, the center bridges people and the histories and stories that are otherwise forgotten but intricately linked to understanding our unseen connections to each other. Thirdly, the center serves as a space of return for those who left the Crossroads to reclaim their place in history and to tell their stories that may fill in the blanks of mystery. Ultimately, the center serves to unite those who left and and those who wait for the return of loved ones for whom they lost contact due to various circumstances. Here, possibilities abound.