MUR 014 | EIMI TAGORE || FLOATING MONUMENTS
Tsunami boulders lie scattered along the Yaeyama coast, colossal witnesses to the violence of oceanic upheaval and the quiet resilience of island life. Uprooted from the sea and cast ashore, these stones echo the lived experiences of islanders displaced by waves of both water and history—resettled from one island to another, carrying memory like hermit crabs in borrowed shells. Fossils embedded in limestone, or the slow scuttle of coastal creatures, preserve stories of rupture, survival, and adaptation.
Eimi’s short residency focused on the island’s coastal formations—particularly the boulders displaced inland by the 1771 Meiwa Tsunami. These immense geological remnants are not only natural archives but mnemonic devices, binding natural disaster to cultural memory.
Tagore’s fieldwork followed the maps featured in Floating Monument, a recent exhibition she curated at Alison Bradley Projects with Japanese artist Motoyuki Shitamichi. Her ongoing doctoral research in East Asian Studies at New York University examines contemporary Transpacific art that engages with the entanglements of colonial history, displacement, and ecological trauma.
In Ohama, Eimi encountered one of Ishigaki’s most enigmatic formations: the so-called Great Tsunami Rock. Estimated to weigh over 1,000 tons, this boulder was lifted from the seafloor by a tsunami nearly two millennia ago. Its coral-encrusted surface bears the fossils of an ancient seabed—now a designated natural monument, and a site where past and present collide in stone.
Through her time here, she continued to trace the subtle geographies of rupture and resistance that shape the archipelago’s visual and political landscapes.
Eimi Tagore is a researcher, writer, and curator based between New York and Tokyo. Her work focuses on contemporary Transpacific art that engages with histories of colonialism, migration, and ecological transformation. Currently a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies at New York University, her dissertation explores artistic responses to natural disasters and cultural memory across the Pacific, with particular attention to Japan, Okinawa, and diasporic communities.