Welcome to Festival Zone for Sept 2024.

Post from Japan - Kōwhai Residency in Yōga, Tokyo

Our unique 2024 Kōwhai Residency in Yōga, Tokyo for research is well underway and we have had good feedback from our 2024 research artist in residence, Theo Macdonald, who is enjoying a dedicated photographic experience for a NZ photographer. His residency started at the beginning of August with weeks of high temperatures, bordering on excessive heat to navigate, Theo has sent us an update on his time there in the last few weeks. We are thrilled to share this overview of what he’s been doing.

"The residency is for five weeks, I am researching fûkeiron in the city where this methodology was theorised, debated and actualised.

In brief, fûkeiron was born out of the radical cinema of the student protest era — the Japanese Nūberu bāgu or nouvelle vague — and a belief that the political reality of the Japanese could not be sufficiently communicated through the stories of individual leftists. Instead, the camera must be trained on the urban landscapes everyday people inhabit, reading these offices, apartment blocks, public parks, highways, train tracks and hotels as (in the words of activist-writer Tsumara Takashi) “texts of state power".

I’ve spent the first two weeks in the research libraries at the National Film Archive of Japan and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum – using Google translate. In particular, I am looking into film director Nagisa Oshima, whose films Boy and The Man Who Left His Will on Film (originally titled “Tokyo Landscape War”) pioneered this approach to landscape, and who only ever made one film outside Japan: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, shot in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Rarotonga.

Is Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence a “landscape theory” film, even if only for New Zealand viewers? On his film A.K.A Serial Killer, which follows the path of spree killer Norio Nagayama, director Masao Adachi said “I began to realise that Nagayama’s unique landscape and my unique landscape were part of the same landscape, in short, it wasn’t that we were seeing landscape, but rather we were being seen by the landscapes we were trying to film.” Is the same true of Oshima’s Auckland? ” (abridged) wrote Theo.

His full update is available here in PDF form - Theo Macdonald; August 2024 update

2024 Kōwhai Residency in Yōga, Tokyo is a exclusive NZ photography residency programme established from New Zealand.

Theo will be holding a 'meet the artist' activity for his end of Kōwhai Residency research placement in Tokyo on Saturday 7th September, 5pm at the Tokyo Institute of Photography, so if you are in Tokyo then we'd love you to go along and support this! For those of us in Auckland, we will get the wonderful opportunity to hear Theo present on his residency experience at 'Asia After Five' on October 30th, more details in next month's newsletter.

Thanks to the generous support of Asia New Zealand Foundation Te Whītau Tūhon, and our support programme in Japan, T3 Photo Festival Tokyo. Image above by Theo Macdonald, Harajuku gathering area, 2024.