Message from the artist

I already had the opportunity to come and work at Tottori with the Bird Theater in 2014, as part of the Gei-Ju Sai festival. I was then able to realize what immersion in a culture radically different from mine could cause in terms of destabilization and questioning, but also curiosity and creativity. My collaboration with Makoto Nakashima as scenographer on the show "Friends" (unfortunately at a distance because of COVID) allowed me, a few years later, to pursue a dialogue with this culture so far from mine, but which attracts me so much. The invitation made to me today to carry out a specific work on the occasion of a residence in the context of Tottori is for me the opportunity to transform this exchange and to materialize it. The residence will give to me the occasion of producing a series of works translating my curious relationship with a language and a script which is so unfamiliar to me, that it is easier for me to apprehend it as a game object, than my owns language.

I will present two exhibitions for the Bird Festival: one will be devoted to my work in general, the other will be a specific project conceived during a residency at Tottori. Over the past ten years, I have been developing a work of de-construction of the written sign, which can take the form of drawings of letters, sculptures, installations, photos, or performances, questioning, often with humour, the question of meaning. I can neither speak nor read Japanese, and I would like to use this ignorance to make it create new or displaced meanings. This residency will give me the opportunity to make drawings inventing formally transgressive and hybrid hiraganas, sculptures involving playful hai-kus, photographs scrutinizing the zero level of urban communication, perceived by an illiterate foreigner, and install poetic and offbeat road signs in the city. This work, questioning the notions of comprehensibility, must be understood as an amused questioning on the possible understanding between human beings, beyond the barriers of culture, beyond the barriers of meaning, and echoes the "tobu", this leap towards a better world which is proposed as the theme of the Bird festival.