Closer to PIPA: the artist speaks in the Institute collection

In addition to the text above, Yukie and Inês’ participation in Closer to PIPA also included a small interview with the artists. Check out below:

Which criteria did you use to select, among so many, the images that would be in the kakejikus?

Inês: Each roll represents the images exchanged during a season of the year, for example, winter in Japan 2019 / summer in Brazil 2019. From the images produced in this season, we chose sets that we liked the most (four images from the same day) based on diverse and subjetive criteria, such as the harmony between them, the memory of an experienced situation, an important historic moment etc. The images that entered [the kakejikus] small are of messages exchanged between us via Whats App in the said season.

In this process of a dialogue between distant spatialities, beyond the temporalities, what were the connecting points that you noticed? And what were the distancing points, besides the physical space?

Inês: To me, the transformation of my perception in relation to my own daily life was striking. I started to see Japan in everything. In my house I discovered Japanese slippers and a Japanese pumpkin; I walked down the street and noticed Japanese people multiplying around me. Over time, Yukie’s way of seeing things (which came with the images) started to influence me: I feel that I learned from her a fun and delicate way of looking, and that our views were coming closer. Over time, I produced images for her in dialogue with the images that had arrived.

Yukie: At the beginning of the project I felt the need to show to Inês my life in Japan, so I sought to portray more characteristic cultural details, such as having some kind of text in the images or something that would refer to Japanese religiosity. At the same time, I felt a certain struggle to photograph my daily life: “what will I photograph today if there’s nothing visually interesting…”. But over time, inspired by Inês’ vision, I started diving into the project.

We felt the distancing during the editing of the images. This process would have been much more pleasant and dynamic if we could have been together offline, putting the printed images over a table, getting the overall vision of the sequence. We did that only once, when I was in Brazil. But the majority of the editing was apart, exchanging PDFs and sharing screens.

Do you have any story about the process of the work, including difficulties in the making or any specific episode that happened in that daily routine?

Yukie: There was a funny episode: one day I received a WhatsApp message from Inês: “UK! I just arrived…”. And together with the topic concerning the project (we were planning an exhibition at that time), I’d insert comments referring to England. And she answered everything with some strangeness. After some days I asked what time it was for her and the answer was the same routine key of the 12 hours difference between Brazil and Japan. In that moment I finally realized that she wasn’t in England and that that initial message was a typo. “UK” was in fact “YUK”.

Another “difficulty” was my adjustment to Inês’ time zone: I’d always mistake the day and time of our video calls because I kept the habit of calculating the time as if someone in Brazil was talking to someone in Japan, something that was very common in my life in São Paulo, and I’d always start the call 12 hours too soon…

Online communication is a key factor in our project. And comparing our time with the 80’s, a Japanese professor, recalling a trip he made to Brazil, commented how difficult it was to call Japan or to send film rolls, which took months to arrive at its destination. Pointing out the relevance of our process, he also noted that, in some way, we were anticipating the predominant way of working in the pandemic.

While Inês took pictures in night strolls around São Paulo, Yukie photographed a sunny day at Ueno park. Following this simple daily procedure in opposite places of the planet, Inês and Yukie exchanged images from March of 2018 until June of 2020, allowing an encounter of dichotomous temporalities: Brazilian summer night and Japanese winter day, Brazilian autumn day and Japanese spring night.

“De noite penso no dia, de dia penso na noite / 夜は昼を思い、昼は夜を思う(Yoru ha hiru wo omoi, hiru ga yoru wo omou)” revealed possible or unlikely visual dialogues in poetic juxtapositions of images from diverse everyday routines: glances, places, weathers, subjects, lights.

Seeking a concise way of presenting the 2-and-a-half-years visual dialogue between Inês and Yukie, the exhibiting project proposes a set of ten kakejikus or suspended rolls. The kakejiku is a traditional medium for Japanese painting or calligraphy and is often displayed in the tokonoma, an alcove inside a Japanese house specially designed for viewing precious objects.

With the exception of the first (the work’s title calligraphy by the reverend Kõbun Yamagishi, abbot of the Taineiji Buddhist Temple) and the last one (pandemic), each roll features a group of images taken on the same day and in two opposite seasons of the year.

The choice of using the kakejiku as the work’s medium was due to two reasons: the verticality, which relates to the scrolling of instant messages exchanged daily between the artists; and the portability, similar to the book’s, by allowing to be rolled up to storage and transporting.