Christopher Joshua Benton | From Toba with Love

The project draws from extensive fieldwork and rare archives to explore the overlooked ties between Japan and the Gulf through shared coastal traditions and parallel diving cultures.

The project began with a question: what connects the Arabian ghawwas and Japanese ama—the latter of whom, astonishingly, number fewer than 600 today? Over three months in the Mie Prefecture, Benton worked closely with local historians and retired ama divers, climbing into wetsuits, digging into folklore, and even riding through fishing villages in the back of a pick-up truck with grinning, chain-smoking ojiisans. A series of return visits to Ras Al Khaimah, UAE—his home region—helped form the other half of the story.

From Toba with Love reimagines an early 20th-century tale of Mabrook, an African-born Gulf pearl diver, and Paru, a Japanese ama diver—an impossible romance told across three films: Lover’s Shell, The Copper Stranger, and the titular From Toba with Love. Drawing on archives from the Toba Sea Folk Museum and Northwestern University’s Humphrey Winterton Collection, Benton deploys AI diffusion tools to animate postcards, colonial photos, and personal collections – conjuring new mythologies and cross-oceanic imaginaries.

The result is a three-channel video installation housed inside a black lacquered structure inspired by the traditional amagoya (ama hut)—the communal hearth around which divers share stories, mend nets, and warm their bodies after the cold sea. Visitors are invited to join the fire circle, encircled by film, sound, and memory.

The project is conceptually tied together through Benton’s concept of “pastmaking” – an artistic technique of critical fabulation where he uses storytelling, historiography, and image to fill gaps and omissions in the archive, while flattening the hierarchies between fact, fiction, history, and myth.

Watch a single-channel version of the film below.