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"Heisei 28 or Japan 2016. Heisei is the name of the era before 2019 which began in 1989 when the emperor Akihito succeeded his father Hirohito and that 28 corresponds to our year 2016; therefore the action carried out in/for this performative video is strongly in line with the reality of the contemporary city but at the same time moves away from it with the option of black and white while the word "Heisei" semantically means to carry the desire of peace, or rather of the "fulfillment" of peace.

The scene takes place on a terrace open to the tall buildings of Tokyo where from the beginning, a young girl does her makeup in front of a mirror placed on a table before being united, but as in two parallel places, by one then two then three other people.

Their various behaviors stray from expectations and even metaphors drawn from Japanese thought are read. Unexpected gestures lead to “beyond” readings. The girl is busy with her eye makeup, curling her eyelashes, drawing the contour of the eyelids as if absent from other worries. After sitting down, she slides her hand under her skirt, all the way to the bottom of her crotch, and pulling it out, she notices a liquid that could be blood but the implications of the second interpreter, the artist Jean Sadao and the title recognize it as ink black.

This awakens the echo of one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature of the 12th century, the Hojoki of the hermit poet Kamo no Chomei whose title can be translated as “An Account of My Hut" even if the text deals with earthquakes, famine and fires.

The pages in a modern edition are turned by the performer with an imperturbable face, while a voiceover (from the artist himself who reads the text in ancient Japanese) tells the ephemeral nature of things and the fragility of the human condition up to the word "silence" which makes the performer fall to the ground. Contrary to urban movements, the slow rhythm of the actions of a second woman, dressed in white trousers, white hat and barefoot, and of Jean Sadao transforms them into a ritual, a ritual of a union of artistic practices and times.

He, seated, follows the text and spits out the ink, making sure that it falls on the sheets, which one after the other is hung around his neck, before removing them when they have become single paintings born from traces and flows of that ink. The black in abstract painting which, in the manner of a kakemono (painted rolls), is hung with simple pliers, sways following the wind.

The make-up mirror, however, captured the performer, in the first revelation of this "fake" announced by the subtitle, who recovers it before it disappears as they all disappear according to the thought of the ephemerality of life. Ephemeral and derisive like the soap bubbles that a child, also dressed in white, blows when the second woman paints the body of the performer on the ground with a brush and a single painting swings.

Reverberations - like the mirror - of current and past thought - the music is punctuated by a traditional melody - as well as the time in which he lives they cross symbolic readings, echoes of literature and paintings in a performance that flows like a river with its movements governed by the banks but fluid and passing. The meeting of all these poles of creation, whether it is the artifice of make-up, which will awaken in us the memory of the praises that Baudelaire gave, whether it is action painting or the reading of ancient texts is done stealthily, once again, in the fleeting superimposition of the two registers of the young woman and the performer."

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Simone Dompeyre (director/curator of Traverse Video Festival) 

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