1 – a house-wide fresco in collaboration with Maï Kasahara

on the village’s main street.
i painted the flowing colors of the background and Maïさん painted the sophisticated jewel-like elements, inspired by the architecture of Gaudí.

2 – a 無料店 in the old 嶋田 house

close to the (formerly lively) center of the village, the house had been abandoned for decades and had also been used as storage for a nearby shop, and then also as a bus stop.
everything in it had been put in trash bags, but a quick examination showed that a huge part of that “trash” was in fact in excellent condition and ready to serve : dish-ware, clothing, decoration, tools, writing material and an important corpus of family archives.

i painstakingly separated the trash from the treasures : the useful things were arranged into a “shop” where everything was free, and the actual garbage became a somewhat grim installation-art piece at the back of the store.

many people took many things, including some quite valuable ones, thus saving them from blind destruction and giving them a second life.

during the festival, the space also housed an art exhibition and a poetry event by local artists, thus being a hybrid, multipurpose and open place.

a short video visit can be found here

3 – a collection of words and quotes

based on a practice that i have carried out for over twelve years, of catching and writing down small pieces of language that i hear, for their humor, their poetry, their wisdom…
i handed out small colorful papers to several people from 美咲町 area and asked them to do this collection work ; as they progressively brought them back, i arranged them into a mosaic of words and colors that reflected a part of the local “oral life”.

this mosaic i eventually bequeathed to the owners of the restaurant across the street for them to carry on with the archival. to my delight, they hung it in a very proper space for contemplation and meditation.

4 – a screen-printing

one of the words i collected was “わや”, an 岡山弁 equivalent of ぐちゃぐちゃ.
because i liked the sound, because i felt it reflected my workflow and especially because it was local, i chose it for a design that i made into a very DIY screen-printing screen (using reclaimed material from 嶋田).

i used it to print for free on shirts (including one from the 無料店) and some 団扇.

5 – 団扇

there was a very large number of 団扇 in the 無料店
i screen-printed and hand painted a handful of these to give out in thanks to the people who had made the festival possible.
another set i painted as enlargements of some of the aforementioned paper word-notes, to give out in thanks to the people who had participated in collecting them.

6 – a painting for “Chez nous”

the owners of the local restaurant “chez nous” were very kind to us artists while we were working for the festival, treating us to delicious meals and even taking us out on a trip after the job was done, to thank us for our effort.
as they wished for some color on their facade, i thanked them in return with a work on paper in my own style and favorite 朱色 that i pasted neatly on their wall, thus adding an extra touch of color and rythm to the village street.