Catalogue > At random

OSORESAN Natacha Nisic & Daimaru Ken 3 channels installation, stereo sound, 17’, 2018 The Itako are women who train to become spiritual mediums in Northeast region of Japan and to evoke departed spirits for the living seeking to communicate with the dead. Most of them have visual disabilities and learn language and rites to describe a rich spiritual world entirely through oral communication. Our first meeting wit Nakamura Take took place in Hachinohe city in Jully 2015. Fiming a blind person is a challenge, in one hand, we would see what she would never share with us, and on the other hand, it seems that she « sees » things that we aslo don’t see. We met her two times in 2015 and in 2017. Each sequence was very short between clients who were regularely knocking at her door. Those fragments of her life, moments of remembering songs, rites and legends were too short to build up a large portrait. They became elements of a constellation we wanted to draw : balancing her humility and modesty versus the huge scale of the desaster which happened not so far fom a living region. Her way to travel in unknown countries of dead and spirits, using a treasure of words, notes, incantation, has been guiding own journey into the landscapes revealing the traces of the post catastrophy. (imprégnant par ses paroles chacune de nos visions des paysages que nous traversions). She told us the legend of «Oshirasama», the founding tail for Itakos, a cruel story of a father, a beloved daughter and a horse. As we crossed the city of Soma, we remembered the Horse Festival organized by the city just one year after the disaster. The horses are still there, waiting. The desire to make peace with the dead motivates each one visiting an Itako. What could help us to make our own peace with the heritage of the post catastrophy ? What kind of political individual gestures could face the large scale of political environmental decisons ? We still have to deal wih nuclear threat. As a symbol of fear, the mount Osoresan, a lansdcape of ashes, smoke and dark water, responds to the hyptnotic beauty of the fragmentation of alpha an beta rays displayed at the Rokkasho PR Center. Fear, to be acclimated must show a fascinating face, as Itakos used to be represented ; stranges, unreachable and dangerous figures of women. Witches. We discovered a touching, smily, opened woman. We realized that Take Nakamura is a monument of Japan history. Very precious, rare and fragile. With participation of Take Nakamura and Itakos of Osorezan Cast: Satoko Abe, Fumie Kubota, Yohei Kobayashi, Kyoko Takenaka, Mika Shigemori

Bio Natacha: The work of Natacha Nisic explores the invisible, even magical relationship between images, words, ritual and memory. She interweaves links between stories, past and the present, to reveal the complexities of the relationship of what is shown and what is hidden, the spoken and the unspoken. Her work questions the nature of the image through various media: Super 8, 16MM, video, photography and drawing. In 2014, her highly acclaimed solo exhibition, Echo at the Jeu de Paume in Paris presented several installations created since 1995 and new works produced specifically for this show. She exhibits extensively around the world : recent shows include the Media City Biennale in Seoul (2016), Bienal de la Imagen en movement in Buenos Aires, Munfret in Buenos Aires (2016), Hermès Foundation in Seoul (2012), K21 in Düsseldorf (2011), Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo (2010), British Film Institute, London (2010), and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009). Nisic has been awarded numerous grants and residencies including the Villa Kujoyama, Tokyo in 2001 and 2016 Gyeonngi Creation Center, South Korea (2010) and the Villa Medici, Rome in 2007. Education: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie, Berlin; La Femis, Paris. Born Grenoble, France, 1967. Bio Ken: Ken Daimaru is a history researcher at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, France), and is the author of Between War Wounds and a War of Wounds (Mouvement social). Over the years, his researches have ranged from the social and cultural history of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to medical histories of military conflict between the Russo-Japanese war and the Second World war, focusing on the understanding of subjects “violence, the body, the suffering, the emotions” central to human experience. During 2011-2012, he wrote prolifically on question of health, emotional responses in the aftermath of 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Daimaru was born in the city of Fukuoka. As a young child, he lived in Hiroshima, before moving to Brussels for high school. Since 2003, he lives in Paris.