山の伝言 Yama no Dengon (Mountain Messages) is an offering to the mountains and ancestors where I live in Hiroshima, Japan. The land and vegetal-scapes here bear the history of this place, the site of the first use of a nuclear weapon in war. This altar/installation includes my experiments in foraging and processing kuzu, bamboo, camellia, and other local plants from my mountainside home as a method of transmuting and entwining radiation ecologies with my personal genealogy of war and displacement. As a person in diaspora, I am interested in the ways we build gratitude and relationship with new lands. I examine the histories of exchange between the archipelagos known as Japan and the Philippines, specifically rusontsubo, rustic red ceramic vessels imported from the Philippines and coveted by Japanese tea ceremony practitioners in the 16th century. Abiding by the earth-friendly concept of nasalimetmet, the Ilokano (northern Philippines) sense of frugality or using what’s available, I produced renewed versions of these vessels and weavings from local and gifted materials. Using the ash of bamboo as glaze, impressing the clay with handmade kuzu cordage, weaving iridescent fibers on cardboard looms, I listen to the mountain’s whispers of the remnants of black rain.