In Kyoto
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Kyoto during the Kyotographie festival is reminiscent of these exhibitions of suspended bonsai, emerging from the ground, where the roots of the tree have the same aesthetic value as its flowering or thorny branches.
The visitor finds there the known, closed and thousand-year-old Japan that he was looking for and the one, underground, open and contemporary that he suspected.
Let the purists be reassured: the city has not moved an eyelash after the epidemic.
The gold and silver pavilions, the Kyomizudera temple, the Path of Philosophy or the Gion district remain unmissable... Like the surf, the tens of millions of foreign tourists who flocked there before the covid-19 withdrew from it, discovering a city with intact treasures.
There are even new ones.
Despite its incredible heritage, the least of Kyoto's charms is that it is anything but a museum.
The former imperial capital is also an economic, industrial and university capital, where people work, produce and study.
But it is also a singular city like a planet, more closed than open.
“
No one is waiting for you here
sums up Bertrand Larcher, founder of the Breizh Café brand, who opened an establishment there.
Even the Japanese do not feel at home there.
Snubbing the virus, the city has been enriched with new hotels, pending the reopening of the borders.
The most spectacular is undoubtedly the ACE, a stunning boutique hotel that Kengo Kuma has nestled in the Shimpukan, the former building of the local telephone company.
Kyoto is also a unique city like a planet, more closed than open.
In this place seemingly closed like an egg, the Kyotographie international photography festival is all the more miraculous.
Every spring, dozens of photographers, visual artists and creators from all over the world take over the city.
In addition to museums, galleries and classic exhibition venues, it allows you to enter other exceptional places, residential or industrial.
A printing press, a textile workshop, a sake brewery, a samurai house are transformed into an art gallery during the festival.
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Luxury brands cohabit there each year during the festival, such as the Loewe Foundation with Ikko Narahara (“
Japanesque Zen
”).
︎ Takeshi Asano / KYOTOGRAPHY 2022
Kyotographie was born ten years ago, in 2011, after the great tragedy of Tohoku.
At the time, Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi were looking for a fresh start.
In Kyoto, they stop in front of the Gion Matsuri, one of the three great festivals of this country which has thousands of them.
“
In the back of the houses, we guessed the legacy of previous generations and the spirit of the city.
It was the ferments of Kyotography
“, they write in the catalog of the 2022 edition, tenth of the name.
The festival has become as inevitable as the cherry blossoms.
It has survived all the insults - even that of covid-19, yet a terrible threat to attendance and patrons.
Luxury brands cohabit there each year during the festival: this year, Chanel with an exhibition on Guy Bourdin, Loewe with another on Ikko Narahara, Ruinart with a third on Yuka Takasu...
The bias of the festival is first of all aesthetic.
It has its seekers of absolute beauty.
To explore her familiar themes of water and minerals, Spanish photographer Isabel Munôz worked with dancer Min Tanaka and kimono belt designer Genbei Yamaguchi.
"
I think the next time, I will demolish the idea of photography
", explains the latter, in all simplicity, mischievous and elegant in his black kimono.
Yukari Chikura is one of the revelations of this festival.
She says: “
One night, my deceased father appeared to me in a dream.
He suggested that I find “
the village hidden under the snow
”
".
She hits the road.
Her footsteps lead her to a mist-shrouded mountain hamlet.
Up there she discovers Zaido, a 1300-year-old festival dedicated to the gods.
She drew from it an unreal photographic series, the chronicle of a dream.
Kyotographie is also an opportunity to rediscover Ikko Narahara, one of the great Japanese post-war photographers, at the same time as the extraordinary Ryosokuin temple.
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“Two things catch the eye: pollution and beauty”
Hideka Tonomura, “
Die of love
”.
︎ Takeshi Asano / KYOTOGRAPHY 2022
But Kyotographie also acts as a real revealer, in the photographic sense of the term, because it honors artists and subjects placed in the background in Japanese society.
Like the woman's body, an always embarrassing subject in this culture accustomed to strapping it, from kimono to ropes.
In the 10/10
exhibition
, at the Hosoo gallery, Mayumi Suzuki chronicles her attempt to have a child through a series of compositions in which she appears naked, in the dark, distraught in the face of nature's broken promises.
“
My work is about a taboo: the difficulty of being a woman in Japan
,” she summarizes.
In
Shining Women
, her wrestling sister Hideka Tonomura took close-up portraits of women with breast cancer.
Later, this passionaria will parade through Kyoto at the head of her models, physically marked by illness - but smiling and proud.
When we know how much the Japanese still refuse to talk about these subjects, even to expose their face and their identity, we can only be amazed by their courage.
“
We did it!
“, marvels Hideka Tonomura in front of the town hall of Kyoto, end of the parade.
Pollution taboo too.
Kyoto is indeed the city of the protocol that bears its name, and Japan displays its concern for the environment.
But he is lagging behind on this new concern, an ardent defender of coal and, above all, of the unbridled production and consumption of plastic, of which he dumps part of the waste abroad.
Now it is this poison that Samuel Bollendorff exposes here.
The French photographer has been traveling the seas for years aboard the
Tara Ocean Research
, this unique vessel funded by the Agnès B. Foundation, which brings together artists and scientists on the same pontoon to document and expose marine pollution.
“
I discovered a seventh continent: that of plastic
,” laments this unfortunate explorer.
"
In the ocean, it forms a real territory, six times the size of France
,” he insists, his words taking over from his exhibition
The Tears of the Mermaid
, at the Lake Biwa Museum.
“
Two things catch the eye: pollution and beauty
,” sums up Katsuhiko Hibino, dean of the Tokyo University of the Arts.
Noriko Hayashi, “Sawasawato”.
︎ Takeshi Asano / KYOTOGRAPHY 2022
The family's Japanese unthought is also in Kyotography.
Anna Bedynska documents these lonely parents after their spouse kidnaps their child at the end of a separation and refuses them, with complete legal impunity, visitation rights.
These “portraits of absentees” are blurry shots, empty children's beds, fathers alone in the room that will not be occupied by the sole occupant for whom it had been prepared… Finally, unthought of the story.
Noriko Hayashi followed in the footsteps of a few survivors of a repatriation program to North Korea of North Korean families, including hundreds of Japanese women.
She found 9 of them, of which she chronicles, in a few colorful and dry shots, the destiny.
Run to Kyoto to rest
Maïmouna Guerresi, “Rûh |
Spirito”, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Osaka.
︎ Takeshi Asano / KYOTOGRAPHY 2022
For organizers like Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, opening night is the last stop.
This one is exceptional.
It's the tenth anniversary, and it's that of the reopening of the country, quietly - to business travelers and students already, to tourists soon.
In the streets, on the banks of the river, the students of Kyoto, whose courses have often been online for two years, are snorting and finally breathing under the cherry blossoms.
To open the evening, the mayor of the city Daisaku Kadokawa, in kimono, gives a speech.
In general in Japan, these ceremonies are reduced to boring and interminable salamalecs.
But the mayor is an early supporter of the festival.
Its presence is all the more noticeable as
he is a candidate for his own re-election 48 hours later.
Suddenly he talks about the war in Ukraine.
Such a mention might seem incongruous, even out of place in a room so dressed up.
Until he recalls that Kyoto is twinned with kyiv.
"
I know the Ukrainians well.
I had the mayor on the phone this afternoon.
Do you know that there is a “Cherry Alley” in kyiv, lined with trees?
“, he reveals.
Run to Kyoto to rest there.
Kyotography 2022, until May 8.
kyotographie.jp.