INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE PROGRAM FRANCE – JAPAN

Founded in 2012 by Constance Juliette Meffre, D.D.A Contemporary Art is a curatorial platform supporting contemporary creation, the dissemination and production of works of art in France and abroad. Since 2021, Cléo Verstrepen has joined the structure for writing texts and conducting interviews, and developing and supporting certain projects in Japan.

DDA has worked with Japan from the outset by organizing events in 2013 (with the organization of a meeting between artists at the now legendary Superdeluxe in Tokyo, with David Merlo, Shuhei Nishiyama, Nanami Kohshou… ).

Very quickly an interest is focused on projects interacting with a territory and non-dedicated places (temples, traditional houses, landscape, etc.). A collaboration with Frédéric Weigel & Yoshiko Suto co-founders and co-directors of the Palais des Paris is organized in Takasaki, around residences (with the welcome of David Mériol, Lehmann, Hugues Clément…) between 2014 and 2019.

Despite its borders still closed to tourism, Japan opens its doors to professionals. We are resuming activities with Japan in other forms, in 2022-2023, with the support of Ewen Chardronnet & Maya Minder around « HOMO PHOTOSYNTHETICUS », a creative documentary project and intermedia artistic installation on the theme of algae, ecological transition and human physiological evolution, and, an artist residency program, with Emiko Sato, between Kab Library & residency, in Tokyo and, DDA Contemporary Art and the Ateliers Jeanne Barret, in Marseille.

KAB LIBRARY ART & RESIDENCY

Located in Tokyo’s Kyojima district, KAB: Kyojima Art Library and Residency is a privately held institution curated by Daiki Goto and Emiko Kato. KAB is a house that has been renovated by local artists and designers: Takayoshi Kitagawa, Guy Hirose, Tadayuki Tahara, Yoshitaka Michihata. There is a collection of art books that comes from the fund of KAB director: Emiko Kato, housing and research space.

The artist in residence will present her work within the framework of a Festival registered on her territory.

SUMIDA MUKOJIMA EXPO

An arts festival held in a traditional downtown shitamachi neighborhood, where the elegant and atmospheric « nagaya » townhouse culture lives on. Neighborhood traditions still survive today in Tokyo’s Sumida Mukojima neighborhood, which lived through the ravages of war and has continued to evolve in its own way alongside its traditional « Nagaya culture. »

Sumida’s quieter neighborhoods don’t draw much attention compared to major area attractions like Asakusa and the Tokyo Skytree, but there’s a lot more to the area than just striking landmarks. The Mukojima district, for example, is a characterful neighborhood dotted with dozens of pre-war structures, many of which have existed since the Edo period (1603-1867).

Highlighting the charming but little-known neighborhood and its many wonders, the month-long Sumida Mukojima Expo, a site-specific art festival where former shops and residences have been transformed into installations as well as contemporary art galleries. The artworks on display range from a series of sculptures discreetly placed on the eaves of old houses to artistic performances inspired by the bans during the Covid-19 pandemic. You can see the complete list of participating artists and works presented on the official website of the event: sumidaexpo.com/

TIME OUT press : https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/art/sumida-mukojima-expo

The artist-in-residence will host a workshop with Professor Tatsuo Inagaki’s international students from Hosei University for the Intercultural Department.

法政大学 | Hosei University

HOSEI University, established in 1880 as Tokyo School of Law, is a Japanese university with a long and rich history. The university accepted 1,515 international students in 2019, under the Top Global University Project, and has 255 partner universities in 45 countries and regions.
The university comprises 15 faculties and 38 departments and also offers degrees in English, which means that prospective students have a wide variety of programs to choose from.

Résident LaurEate 2022

LENA HIRIARTBORDE

The artist caught the attention by her approach aiming to pay particular attention to the context, an in-depth acuity to the spaces we pass through and to the latency of presences. She is interested in advanced scientific notions as well as fabrications, to think of an ecosystem that would not be a sum of dominations but rather a combination of alliances. She associates in her devices different mediums, performance, writing, installation, sound and video… between which slip a bit of humor and self-mockery. Her pieces often take place in the presence, sometimes in circulation, and work on a complicity between the beings and the elements which cohabit in these privileged times.

Léna Hiriartborde graduated from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg in 2015, in the Arts Hors Formats research group oriented towards performance and digital art. During her studies, she builds exchanges with the independent circuit of Valparaiso (Chile), where she exhibits in various galleries (Umbral, Casa Nekoe, 2013; Control Remoto, Worm Gallery, 2016…).

Questioning the relationship that peoples of animist traditions maintain with their environment, she then travels to India, then to the Colombian Amazon. She currently resides between Marseille, where she is involved in the self-managed artistic place of La Déviation (Potlatch, 2018), and the hinterland of Grasse, where she participates in the activity of a medicinal plant farm. She lives there her passions for the knowledge of the more than human kingdoms which nourish her practice.

After having developed all kinds of tactics inviting greater attention to spaces and their subtleties, Hiriartborde has been directing her practice since 2017 towards questions of interdependence and interspecies collaboration.

Her works are presented in hybrid forms, mixing performance, photography, writing, installation, sound pieces and videos, between which a touch of humor and self-mockery often slip.

The specificities of Sumida, with its small houses built side by side, interacting in spite of themselves, question the limit where the intimate and the common rub shoulders. And the fact that the cultural spaces of the Sumida Expo network can also be domestic gives rise to a poetry of the everyday and the intimate that interests me.
My process is above all contextual, and is charged with what I encounter on site.
I would like to develop a sensitive exploration of this singular neighbourhood, in order to propose performed visits.
My work will initially consist of a location scouting, and their various specificities. Prospecting in the surroundings, drawing possible itineraries, choosing areas for action. Each place will become the subject of a study or an experiment in details, traces, presences. It will be an investigation and small interventions, while remaining open to events and attentive to what the places and their inhabitants, human or not, whisper.

Based on these explorations, I would like to propose one or more performative visits of the neighbourhood, through the construction of trail games and/or collective walks.
The materials collected could also give rise to an installation or a micro-edition. The latter would combine different routes, traces of actions or interactions with the inhabitants, collections, notes, lists of elements noticed. It would be a cartography of the edges, of what we do not perceive or perceive little.

Production by DDA CONTEMPORARY ART & KAB LIBRAIRY & RESIDENCY in partnership with Les Ateliers Jeanne Barret and the support of the City of Marseille and the South Region

Artistic direction by Constance Meffre in Marseille, production support by Cléo Verstrepen in Tokyo