NUCLEAR BOMB MEMORIAL PROJECT

This project examines the imbrications of memory, erasure, and geopolitical aftermath through landscape interventions with ceramics marked "Made in Occupied Japan." These imported novelty items, produced during the American occupation of Japan following World War II (Klamkin, 1976), are reimagined as site-specific installations following New Mexico's longitutde from Los Alamos to the Trinity nuclear bomb testing site. Here hundreds of figurines are reassembled into ~3 ft. tall massings, visually referencing the geometry of implosion and embodying both material and historical displacement. This memorial project serves to unite the overlooked narratives of postwar Japan and the United States, confronting how architecture, artifact, and language elicit a form of collective remembrance.