Marsha McDonald and Kyoko Yoshida
United States of America + Japan
Marsha McDonald and Kyoko Yoshida
Going to Meet the Dogs, 2021
Video on monitor
10:01 minutes
This project is based on Kyoko Yoshida’s story Going to Meet the Dogs, which is part of the ongoing project Miracle Dogs. The story is inspired by the life of Karafuto-inu, or Sakhalin Laika, in the Antarctic explorations. The dogs were lifelines for the humans in early polar explorations: The dogs pulled sleds heavy with equipment, and in dire situations they were sacrificed as emergency food. Much later when research bases were established in Antarctica, national teams brought dogs as their essential companions and colleagues. Today, for ecological reasons, dogs are banned from Antarctica, and they all have been withdrawn from the continent, but their spirits still reside there …. Kyoko’s story is a speculative exploration of their role and fate in the history of the arctic exploration and an imaginary attempt to bring them back home.
The story was initially published in the literary journal La Mer Gelée in French translation. Translation is an important part of her work. It’s a transformative process – text becomes transformed into a double, a separate but same being, over which you don’t have control. When Marsha McDonald proposed a collaborative project, Kyoko accepted the invitation for another kind of collaborative transformation.
The interspecies bond between animals and humans is nothing like those among human beings. The nonverbal trust between the two is a miracle of its own. Kyoko wishes to emulate at least the spirit of this trust when she collaborates with other artists across medias and languages.
about the artists
Marsha McDonald (1957) is the recipient of grants from the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, the Pollock-Krasner, Puffin, Mary Nohl (travel) Foundations, a New York Fellowship, as well as grants and residencies in Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Japan. She has contributed to platforms for art and poetry in Paris, Venice, Hamburg, Budapest, and in Wisconsin, Boston, and New York. Exhibitions include the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences , Art+Lit+Lab (Madison, Wisconsin), and The New Museum (Los Gatos, California). She often collaborates with writers, poets, and composers, most recently with poet Chuck Stebelton (U.S.), and writers Kyoko Yoshida (Kyoto) and Anca Cristofovici (Paris). Marsha has been published in Otoliths magazine (Australia), Cha Asian Literary Journal (China), The Cantabrigian, and The Drum (U.S.). She is represented by galleries in San Francisco, Milwaukee, and New York.
Marsha’s teaching and art have frequently taken her outside of Wisconsin. She has lived in other parts of the USA, Europe, and Asia. It’s a little difficult at times, to be far from “home,” but the familiar follows her, creating a dialogue with ideas of belonging and remembrance. Her work is intentionally grounded in how and where she lives, the shifting relationships that arise, exist, or have existed between people, living things, objects and places. She is immigrating to Portugal from the USA in late 2021.
marshamcdonaldart.com
Marsha’s teaching and art have frequently taken her outside of Wisconsin. She has lived in other parts of the USA, Europe, and Asia. It’s a little difficult at times, to be far from “home,” but the familiar follows her, creating a dialogue with ideas of belonging and remembrance. Her work is intentionally grounded in how and where she lives, the shifting relationships that arise, exist, or have existed between people, living things, objects and places. She is immigrating to Portugal from the USA in late 2021.
marshamcdonaldart.com
Kyoko Yoshida (1969) was born and raised in Fukuoka, Japan. She studied American Literature at Kyoto University. After seven years in Kyoto, she lived in Milwaukee, from 1996 to 2001, to study Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She published her short stories in English in various literary journals, including Beloit Fiction Journal, Massachusetts Review, and Chelsea. She served as fiction editor and later editor-in-chief at The Cream City Review. Her first collection of short stories in English Disorientalism came out in 2014 from Vagabond Press in Sydney. It features 19 short stories and includes several animal fables. She also has a chapbook Spring Sleepers (Norwich: Strangers Press, 2016), with an introduction by Brian Evenson. Her stories have been anthologized in BooksActually’s Gold Standard 2016 (Singapore) and After Coetzee: An Anthology of Animal Fictions (Minneapolis: Faunary Press, 2017). Kyoko translates contemporary experimental Japanese poetry and drama. Spectacle & Pigsty: Poetry by Kiwao Nomura (Richmond: OmniDawn, 2011, co-translated with Forrest Gander) won the 2012 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry in the U.S. and the 2012 Toson Memorial Rekitei Award in Japan. Other poets and playwrights she has translated or co-translated include Gozo Yoshimasu, Mimi Hachikai, Masataka Matsuda, and Shu Matsui. She also translates American novels into Japanese. From 2001 to 2014, she taught English at Keio University in Tokyo. In 2005, she was an honorary fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2014, she moved to Kyoto to teach American Literature at Ritsumeikan University.
kyokoyoshida.net
kyokoyoshida.net
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