Mira,Miru
120,000 people. That’s the number of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in concentration camps in the United States during WW2. Statistics often abstract the seriousness of situations and I do not understand what that number looks like in a physical form. This is my attempt to humanize this statistic to understand the gravity of this history and to give humanity to our past. Screen printed dots represent each individual who was incarcerated behind barbed wires for nearly 3 years- simply for having 1/16th or more Japanese blood.
These dots also represent the history of Senninbari (千人針), which is a “thousand person stitches” cloth made by Japanese women to protect soldiers going off to war. Each french knot stitch was made by a different woman, making this a community project to create a protective amulet.
This project is about solidarity, recognition and the magnitude of what 120,000 look like.