Knotted to Be Unknotted
La trame de ce projet trouve son origine dans la rencontre d’Aurélie Lanoiselée avec Yoshika Yajima, doctorante à Osaka travaillant sur une thèse intitulée « La tradition des hanamusubi (nœuds de fleurs) dans la période Edo du point de vue du genre ». Les hanamusubi, shifuku, et shutara fonctionnent comme un codex, une pratique qui ne perdure que par la transmission manuelle. Le projet d’Aurélie Lanoiselée cherche, par la main l’aiguille et la couleur à questionner la pratique et l’objet « noué pour être dénoué » ; il s’articulera autour de la manière de rendre visible l’invisible, le tissu social d’un lien qui relie, la rencontre de la corde glissée et de la main, d’une pensée et d’un geste créateur de forme autour des matières exclusivement japonaises.
Chikasui
After the project “Water Calling” in collaboration with Yoshiko Nagai, which maps Kyoto’s groundwater in texts and drawings, Isabelle Daëron’s wishes to examine interfaces with invisible water, which can be the water supply system or underground water, for example grids, valves, gullies and wells. Her objective is to extend this research to cities beyond Kyoto and, ultimately, propose objects for public spaces. The residency could conclude with an urban walking tour. The “world beneath our feet” has less symbolic resonance in Japan than in the west, and this is something Isabelle Daëron wishes to explore.
The Paper Organ
For this Thursday at Villa Kujoyama, The Paper Organ is activated by Muriel Marschal and Emi Ogura. Muriel Marschal reimagines the myths of the Kojiki as a nine-part cosmology, seeking to reawaken a sense of the sacred within a disoriented world. Each scene in this journey, tracing the birth of the world and the gods, unfolds as vibration, sonic material, and a resonance of origins. Performer Emi Ogura gives voice to Muriel Marschal’s text, extending its echoes through an interpretation oscillating between speech, breath, and song. Together, they shape a performance where narration, sound, and material presence are closely interwoven, bringing scenes from the Kojiki into an experience that is both intimate and shared.
Love to Death
“Love to Death” is a choreographic piece that brings together dance and a series of sculptural objects: mask, costume, and video. Its structure follows the five chapters of Yūkoku (Rites of Love and Death), the controversial 1966 film by Yukio Mishima portraying the final moments of a couple on the verge of taking their own lives. Filmed entirely behind closed doors in a Noh theatre, it also foreshadows the author’s own seppuku in 1970. Through five scenes oscillating between tragic and grotesque—reminiscences, metamorphoses, lip sync, harakiri, and a farewell ritual—the spectator is invited to navigate these elements as one would wander through a story shattered across space. Balancing performative gestures and poetic language, the work explores our relationship to death, desire, and metamorphosis.
In this free reinterpretation of the third chapter, two dancing silhouettes, filmed separately, nevertheless seem to share the same space through superimposition and editing. Their bodies cross paths, overlap, and dissolve into one another, creating the illusion of a duet haunted by an unseen presence. The video thus establishes a spectral relationship between the figures, where the image becomes the site of an impossible encounter between presence and absence.
Shokudō
Shokudō, a documentary directed by Dimitri Krassoulia-Vronsky, follows the research project developed by Martin Planchaud during his 2025 residency at Villa Kujoyama. Blending documentary inquiry with a sensitive and immersive approach, the project explores collective dining spaces in Japan through the figure of the shokudō — the Japanese cafeteria — understood as a social, political, and cultural microcosm reflecting broader changes in contemporary Japanese society. Filmed across school cafeterias, university dining halls, workers’ canteens, neighborhood eateries, and corporate lunch spaces, the documentary examines how shared meals shape social bonds, transmit forms of knowledge, and foster collective experience. Martin Planchaud’s research pays close attention not only to culinary practices, but also to the systems surrounding them: food preparation, distribution networks, food education, spatial organization, and the role of cooks in everyday life.
