In 2016, during the first of two long summer residencies in a rural area of southern Japan. Anne-Sophie Guillet starts “Komorebi”, a series combining short static videos and photographs working by the jamming of scales. Its title means the light filtering through the leaves and the trees. These pictures are made with intuition, to the whim of her repeated walks in a limited scope. Between mountains, rice fields and the sea, she brings us deep within “a time and space of narration”, maybe even into the concrete space of life, this space where, unlike the conceptualized extent by the Cartesianism, would continue to grow jointly beings and things 1. Rocked by the so particular cicada song, the videos of ‘Screens’, ‘Goldfish’ or ‘Bamboo forest’ could have integrated the concept of ‘mono no aware’, this “sensitivity towards ephemeral”, or to the “poignant of things” according to the translation of Jacques Roubaud, that emphasis the whole aesthetic of the archipelago.

text: Marie Chenêl

All images ©Anne-Sophie Guillet