Tomoko Daido

Tomoko Daido defines herself primarily as a photographer and rejects the label of artist. Her practice stems from a social vocation, distancing herself from the self-referential and often egocentric idea of today's photographic practice. With this distinction he points out the main material he works with: memory. His project ‘Murmur’ takes us to images of those places that have remained engraved in the collective memory, not so much of his host country, the United States, or of his country of origin, Japan, but that memory that has marked generations of the entire Western world. Impressive images that we have seen on the screen: Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union or the subsequent war in the Balkans, and how it is possible that something like this could happen again in Europe.

 

Daido works with collective memory and searches for the remains on the ground - an archaeology of what remains hidden to the naked eye - like someone who is going to verify first-hand that those images that are engraved in his memory really belong to a place and are real events. But what he photographs cannot be placed in a specific time or place. His photographs are not chronicles. It is rather a matter of photographing those places that seem burdened, dense, heavy, impregnated with the same memory of what once happened and has been trying to heal for a long time.