The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) debuts a new video and installation by Maya Jeffereis that reframes an overlooked history of Japanese migration to Brazil in the early 20th century, which formed the largest Japanese diaspora in the world. Blending archival documentation, experimental film techniques, and firsthand accounts, Jeffereis captures transnational entanglements of migration, labor, and cultural inheritance in her fluid, dreamlike compositions.

Jeffereis’s art focuses on counter-narratives of diasporic Asian communities, including her own family’s experience working as contract laborers on Hawaiian sugar plantations after immigrating from Japan and later, their forced removal and incarceration in the United States during World War II. Starting from personal archives, her work expands outward, tracing shared struggles and legacies of resistance across geographies. Jeffereis finds inspiration from Pacific scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa’s vision of Oceania as a unified “sea of islands,” and imagines the ocean not as a barrier, but as a site of ancestral continuity.

For this exhibition, Jeffereis turns her attention to the wave of Japanese laborers that immigrated to Brazil to work on coffee plantations, a movement that began in 1908, in the wake of slavery’s abolition and shifting global immigration policies. Resisting conventional methods of presenting historical footage on this subject, she transfers images from Japanese Brazilian archives to 16mm film and uses a phytogram process—a cameraless technique in which plants develop the photograph or moving image. Plants from both Brazil and Japan, including açaí, coffee, hibiscus and chamomile flowers, kariyasu (Japanese silver grass) and kihada (Amur cork tree bark), give visual form to the hazy images on screen, interrupting the documentary gaze. Jeffereis extends this practice in the gallery with an installation composed of naturally dyed fabric and anthotypes—prints made from plant extracts.