Motherlands
(motherlands are made of glass Elif Shafak)

70 x 3000 cm,
scroll direction ← right to left,
watercolor on paper, 2025

This project weaves personal family history, transgenerational experience, and Japanese mythology into an artistic narrative that connects memory and the present. It explores motherhood, loss, and inherited grief, and examines how memory can merge with myth, manga, and animistic landscapes to form a new kind of storytelling.

It follows the principle of emakimono, Japanese picture scrolls in which text and image merge into a continuous narrative flow.
I tell the story of my grandmother and thus, my own.

My grandmother was born in Hiroshima. She taught at an elementary school when she met my grandfather, a Jesuit missionary from South Tyrol. When they decided to marry, she was disowned by her family. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, part of her family was killed. Her students did not survive either, the school where she had taught was located at the epicenter.

The scroll begins with a sparrow yōkai, a spirit creature that tells the story. The journey leads from the explosion, to a postcard of Mount Fuji on my dresser, and a selfie on the summit of Fuji, continuing on to the Omote Pass, which winds over the enchanted Kintoki Mountain, a mythical landscape shaped by ancient tales, such as that of the wild boy Kintarō and a giant bear.

The pass runs from Sengokuhara to Gotemba. Two months after the bombing, my grandmother crossed it on foot to take a train from Gotemba to Hiroshima. She often spoke of the hardship of this journey, but never of what she found when she arrived.

Japan has long been inhabited by a dense world of fantastic beings, embodying fear, rupture, and desire. They help me fill the blind spots of history. Gojira is a yōkai of the atomic age. The grieving fox spirit Kuzunoha (葛の葉), first mentioned in the Nihon Ryōiki around 822 CE, mourns her children as my grandmother mourned her students.Whenever she looked at the photograph showing her with her class, she became silent. My mother recalled how she would stroke the image and cry.