Fields Fallen from Distant Songs
![]()
Fields Fallen from Distant Songs
2023
Two-channel video installation, 11 minutes
Installation view: The World Is Before You at EFA Project Space, July 6--August 12, 2023
Fields Fallen from Distant Songs is an experimental film loosely inspired Jeffereis' great-grandparents' history as Japanese immigrant laborers on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations. The film contends with contemporary questions of sovereignty, solidarity, and hauntings of the past as they persist in the present. A cross-temporal narrative unfolds as ghostly images flicker across the screen: found footage of workers on the plantations intersperse with Japanese folk songs, poetry, 16mm home movies shot by her grandfather in the 1960s, and the artist’s own footage of the eruption of Kīlauea in January 2023. The material, economic, and cultural connotations of sugar are inextricable from histories of migration and displacement, but Jeffereis attempts to reframe this narrative by exploring notions of rematriation, of returning ancestral land.