Realigning the islands, contesting infrastructural Okinawa: toward Yamashiro Chikako’s archipelagic fabulation

Departing from the ongoing US base construction in Okinawa’s Henoko area, this study reckons with what contemporary art can do when provoked into addressing Okinawa’s sociopolitical and environmental conundrums. It focuses on the multimedia works of Naha-born artist Yamashiro Chikako (1976–), foregrounding her shift from early performance videos to experimental short films. Among these, the article closely examines two short films, Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family (2019) and Reframing (2021). Building on thinkers such as Imafuku Ryūta—whose envisioning of archipelagic thinking gestures toward transversal interconnectivities between sea, islands, (non)human and more-than-human beings—this article first leverages “Infrastructural Okinawa” as a critical lens to contextualize Yamashiro’s intervention. This perspective views the island chain as a (post)colonial dispositif produced and unevenly distributed by the US–Japan security–extractive regime, comprehending Okinawa not only through its entanglements of infrastructural–logistical networks, but also as a regime of aesthetics and affect that channels war trauma and the brutalism of colonial governance across Asia and beyond. Further, turning to Yamashiro’s short films, this study uses “archipelagic fabulation” to foreground her speculative, place-based method and aesthetic intervention that reassembles interconnected island–oceanic geographies, temporalities, and imaginaries to critically engage the in/visibility of Infrastructural Okinawa and its necropolitics. Yamashiro’s art awakens island archives, enacts anachronic temporalities, and forges trans-geographic imaginaries that entwine Okinawa with other postcolonial places—thus provoking an archipelagic vision that contests continentalist spatial–temporal logic and infrastructural brutalism.