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In the installation a sex doll on a bed is looking at a video. In this video Tomoko's mother tells about her life in Japan. Tomoko, her grandmother and her mother lived together in the same house. After the grandmother, who brought Tomoko up, died she no longer experienced the house she grew up in as a place where she felt comfortable. She decided to look for that place, and her search took her to Holland, where she experiences the differences in language and culture. So she noticed that to a Japanese person 'Dutch wife' (chikufujin) does not just mean a wife from Holland, but that in the 17th century it was also the word for a bedpillow, and that nowadays it has taken on the meanings of whore, a rubber sex-doll, or other female forms related to sex. According to Tomoko Take we have to go back several centuries to find the origin of this meaning. In Japan the period between approx. 1630 and approx. 1858 is known as the closed borders period (sakoku). Contact with the outside world was almost solely through the trade island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay which was established by the Dutch East India Company in 1641. Not just men lived there, but when the Japanese women declined to serve them as prostitutes out of fear of these unwashed and coarse 'giants', women were also 'imported' from Holland, says Take. The different meanings of the concept 'Dutch wife' play an important role in the performance, the video and the installation. In each Tomoko Take uses inflatable sex-dolls, which she made in cotton and PVC from patterns made of her own body. The cotton versions of her body also wear her face, the PVC versions are faceless. Both versions are mass-produced – the cotton versions are supplied with either her face or that of the client – and so for her are related to the anonymity of the body as in prostitution. But prostitutes have a public and a private life. In the video we see her mother talking about her life as a woman and a mother in the last decade in Japan. She tells of the different jobs she had and how she got pregnant from one of her clients when she was working in a 'cabaret'. But both mother and daughter realize that “if you talk a memory would be vanished. That's why I am only talking about the things around it”.
And so the daughter hears the as yet untold stories from and about her mother. And about her unknown father, who she decides to try and find. In her performance Tomoko Take also combines different aspects of the concept 'Dutch wife'. She consciously chooses to develop one theme in several forms to bring out various angles as well. Central to the display as well as to the performance are the differences in interpretation of language and symbols not just between Japanese and Dutch culture, but between all cultures. The point of departure of the performance is the conventions three women adhere to in their lives and concepts such as physicalness, humanity and the relationship between the sexes. New images are mixed with material from the video of the installation and projected for the performance. Her collaboration with Easy Tune also gives live sound an important role in the performance. “What does a truth mean to me?” she wonders in the video. “ A lie can be a truth, a fact can also be a truth, and when a truth is a false, the fact is nonsense. The only things I can trust as truth are beautiful things.” Or as she comments in an interview “the best thing will be, is to bet your future on beautiful things”.
– Carla Hoekendijk
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