Water Children

In Water Children, Dutch director Aliona van der Horst documents a friend's unusual art installation. Tomoko Mukaiyama, a classical pianist and visual artist of Dutch and Japanese extraction, decided to create a piece that expresses her thoughts about a woman's loss of fertility. Although she has a daughter who assists with the project, the onset of menopause finds Mukaiyama pondering the reality that she will no longer be able to conceive, and she concentrates her attention on menstrual fluid or "moon blood." In the damp, isolated Japanese town of Sanga Mura, she fills a hall with her art piece, which she titles "wasted." Arranged like a maze through which viewers can walk, it consists of layers of 12,000 diaphanous white silk dresses. In the center, a cluster of blood-saturated fabric hangs from the cathedral ceiling (from this vantage point, the piece looks like the inside of a jellyfish). One observer says it makes her feel sad, another finds it wonderful, while a third considers it inappropriate. Mukaiyama encourages other women to saturate a dress and to share their thoughts with her, so that she can incorporate their experiences into her musical improvisations on J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Van der Horst, who admits she has had her own fertility issues, spends time interviewing some of these women attendees, who talk about pregnancy, motherhood, hysterectomies, and miscarriages (in Japan, a "water child" signifies a miscarriage—one woman who lost a child 24 years before finds the "ritual of the dress" particularly cathartic). A multidisciplinary title that works in women's studies and art collections, as well as being an engaging documentary for general viewers, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)