Program subject to change.
Schedule will be updated on this page.
Please note that Villa Kujoyama has no parking facilities for cars, only bicycle parking.
Thursdays at Villa Kujoyama: the program for August 7, 2025
Thursdays at Villa Kujoyama
07 aug. 2025Villa Kujoyama
Dates
Le 07 aug. 2025
14 h - 21 h
Venue and informations
Villa Kujoyama
Free admission
Program
14:00 – 18:30 – Studios
Open studios by Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust & Grégoire Schaller, Agathe Charnet, Mark Geffriaud, Mona Oren, and Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion
14:15 – 14:45 – Auditorium
“unedansecontinue”: performance by Emmanuelle Huynh
16:00 – 17:15 – Auditorium
“Partition of the Unknown Self: a danced lecture in progress” by Nach and Rosa van Hensbergen
18:30 – 19:00 – Terrace
Performance conceived by Domitille Martin, dance by Meri Otoshi, Asami Yasumoto, and Ayuko Nakamura
Tatami surfaces created in collaboration with Mitsuru Yokoyama / Music by Krikor Kouchian (2021, music)
19:30 – 20:00 – Salon
Streaming of a reading by Kasumi Mitama, ghost VTuber and horror story teller, invited by Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion (Japanese with French subtitles)
20:00 – 21:00 – Salon
Cocktail
20:30 – 21:00 – Salon
DJ set by Maël Péneau
Projects
Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion (2025, digital art / digital productions)
moëra
Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion create installations, videos, and net-art that explore the social and political impact of digital technologies. At Villa Kujoyama, they will develop a video series inspired by VTubing — a practice from Japan where creators use avatars to represent themselves online. These virtual figures, often cute, empowering, or fetishized, create a space where identity, fan fiction, and online communities meet in the age of techno-capitalism. The project will involve collaborations with VTubers, research in emblematic locations, and the study of fantasy storytelling and its transformation through digital media. This Thursday, they are inviting VTuber Kasumi Mitami to give a streamed reading.
Maël Péneau (2025, music)
Mid-0 series
Maël Péneau’s project explores Roland’s “Mid-0” series of electronic instruments, launched in the 1980s, and their lasting impact on popular music worldwide. The aim is to analyze the contribution of these instruments, their design, and the historical, social and cultural conditions of their creation. Through interviews, it will look at the careers of the creators, their environment in the Japan of the 1970s-80s, and the circulation of instruments and technologies on a global scale. This project will give rise to a musical creation based on recorded voices, recordings made in places linked to the history of these machines, and the sounds of the “Mid-0” series.
Grégoire Schaller et Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust (2025, dance)
Grieving
“Grieving” is a cross-disciplinary research and creation project on the theatricalisation of death in Japanese culture, comprising field surveys, performative experimentation and costume creation. The research will be in two stages, beginning with an immersion period and meetings with cultural institutions and actors in Japan, followed by a performance in France based on the outcomes of this research. The project will focus on the connection between the representation of death and performativity (butoh dance and the seppuku ritual); costumes and masks as reincarnations of the deceased (noh theatre), and rituals in which the dead are summoned through festivals (by documenting two traditional festivals in Kyoto).
Mark Geffriaud (2025, visual arts)
Traditional Japanese architecture, a contemporary ecology
Mark Geffriaud works with sculpture, photography, film, and performance. During his residency, he will focus on abandoned traditional houses in Kyoto and the changing fate of forests as the demand for timber declines. He aims to draw inspiration from this surplus of materials and from the ability of these houses to be repaired and dismantled, in order to imagine artworks whose preservation would rely on mobility and the reuse of their components. At the same time, he is interested in the spaces for reflection and imagination that emerge as production forests are left untended. These millions of hectares of unthought land may outline the contours of a counter-project in our relationship to so-called “natural” spaces : leaving in order to return differently.
Agathe Charnet (2025, theatre)
Himono-onna: What to bring into the world today?
Agathe Charnet’s project aims to draw a sensitive and well-documented portrait of what it means to “choose or not to choose to start a family at the dawn of the 21st century,” through a comparative lens between France and Japan. Rooted in a feminist perspective, the project explores the current state of struggles for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in Japan, as well as the varying conceptions of romantic love. By intertwining life experiences shaped by such different cultural contexts, the project seeks to weave connections and dialogue through words shared during interviews and on-site workshops. The ultimate goal is to write a theatrical play that can be staged in both countries.
Mona Oren (2025, crafts)
Haze wax, a treasure to explore
Mona Oren’s work revolves around an emotional core woven from impermanence and memory, embodied in a material that reflects this sensitivity: white wax. For her, wax is not merely a substance, but a living material. Her encounter with haze wax in 2022 led to numerous experiments aimed at finding blends that would allow her to sculpt this highly singular, plant-based material. She now wishes to continue this exploration, focusing on wax, hazé trees, and other materials unique to Japan—such as rice wax, washi paper, and sumi ink sticks. The resulting body of work will highlight the poetry of the creative process itself, with the final pieces acting as mirrors of original artifacts—echoes of their memory and transformation.
Domitille Martin (2025, street performance)
Moving Worlds
Domitille Martin is a sculptor of various materials, scenographer and performer. During her residency, she researches the diversity of forms taken by plants in Japanese festivals, both in the use of materials and in the symbolism of dances whose gestures are linked to crops and harvests, particularly that of rice. For her, it is a way of becoming one with the environment by reviving ancestral arts. This research focuses on the multitude of states that plant-based material can take on, and on the stories told through those festivals. For this Thursday at Villa Kujoyama, she presents a performance in which three dancers engage with woven material surfaces in a game of appearances and disappearances, where the boundaries between body, space, and matter become blurred.
Nach (2018, dance)
Nach discovered Butoh during her residency at Villa Kujoyama in 2018. With the Nach Van Van Dance Company, she connects movement rooted in Krump to a narrative exploration of the world and the self — from the perspective of a Black female body seeking to resist imposed identities. She is currently working with Rosa van Hensbergen to develop a methodology for writing scores that celebrate the vitality of her dance: how can one write the score of something that cannot be known or captured? How can the liveliness of an instinctive, visceral dance be preserved?
Emmanuelle Huynh (2001, dance)
Emmanuelle Huynh will perform the creation process of the piece unedansecontinue, conceived for five performers and composer Erik M. The piece will premiere in November 2025 at the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers. Unedansecontinue reveals the geological layer underlying Emmanuelle Huynh’s dance — a layer that has persisted and evolved since Múa, her first opus (1995), oscillating between conceptual intent and an organic, vital overflow. Emmanuelle Huynh reactivates movement cycles and choreographic situations to reconsider their meaning, power, and ability to speak to us in the present.
Photographs and videos will be taken during the event, on which you may be visible. We thank you for your understanding.
TORO café will be selling snacks from 3 pm to 7 pm !
Credits
Visuel : Terrasse, 16h34 © Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion