14 DAY TRIAL // Nagoro is a small village located in the valleys of Shikoku, Japan, which was abandoned by most of its inhabitants over the years and slowly became deserted. However, an artist decided to repopulate the village and restore its beauty with hundreds of handmade dolls.
Ayano Tsukimi, an artist and longtime Nagoro resident, returned to the village 11 years ago and discovered that many of her old neighbors and friends had left for larger cities or simply passed away. She was very disappointed with what she found in the shrinking village, and decided to revive it.
Over the course of ten years, the 64-year-old artist created 350 life-size dolls – each one representing a former villager – and put them in places she considered important to the memory of the person they represented. So, inanimate dolls, made from straw, rags and old clothes, can be seen spread across the village, sitting on benches, standing in the street, outside their houses, fishing in rivers or working in farms.
“When I make dolls of dead people, I think about them, when they were alive and healthy. The dolls are like my children,” Ayano says.
Journalist and filmmaker Fritz Schumann recently visited the abandoned village and filmed a documentary called “The Valley of Dolls” in which he presents Ayano's world of dolls in detail.
The artist started to make dolls to replace the departed a year after she moved back home. When she noticed that her plant seeds wouldn't sprout, she decided to make a scarecrow. The handmade doll reminded her of her father and from there came the idea to replace other friends and family members with similar dolls.
“I never thought it would turn into this,” she says in the documentary. “I have a doll based on myself. Every day she watches the pot and the fire. She’s taking a nap now.”
Although remote, Nagoro was once an active village, with a dam, a big company and hundreds of residents, Oddity Central informs. But currently, only 35 people are still living there, and the population is decreasing, as inhabitants left behind continue to die.
As you will see in the video, the dolls look perfectly natural in their surroundings, and although many have described Tsukimi's work as creepy, the artist says she isn't interested in weird dolls, she just wants to make figures of people who blend into the scenery.
Valley of Dolls from Fritz Schumann on Vimeo.