Osoresan

Osoresan, 3-channel video, stereo sound, 2018.

Dealing with sociological but also mythological representations of fear, Osoresan is the result of three years of research. It is a collaboration between the historian Ken Daimaru and the artist Natacha Nisic after their joint residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 2015. Different layers of representation and textual sources are combined in a fragmented vision of the relationship to fear and to tradition after the Great Catastrophe of 2011. Ken Daimaru and Natacha Nisic met the last Itako, a blind woman of 84 who was trained to visit the realm of the dead. We follow her practice, her visions and her traditional chants, on a journey through post-Fukushima landscapes. A chorus, narrated by some of the actors of the Chiten theatre company, refers to the construction of traditional Japanese theatre.

The music of Osoresan is simple, made up mainly of concrete sounds and modulated white noise. White noise gives us to hear the entirety of the frequencies audible to the human ear. Its use in this film obviously refers to the traditional blindness of the Itako shamans, seeking to substitute through sound what they are not permitted to see: to hear the infinity of sounds and of possibilities of hearing, freed from the image so as to retain only the auditory sensation that is as open to the world as possible.

2019      Osoresan,  Anne de Villepoix gallery, Paris