Could you briefly tell us about your career? 

I am an independent curator and doctoral student in the SACRE programme at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. In 2011, I was a resident at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, alongside Yoann Gourmel. Together we conducted research on the ephemeral and performative artistic practices that emerged in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with the great surge in reconstruction that the country experienced after the Second World War. This residency was not only my first encounter with Japanese art. 2011 was also the year of the triple disaster at Fukushima, an experience that had a strong impact on me, both personally and professionally. The disaster also triggered a more social and political orientation for artists in Japan. Following this residency, I set up a series of exhibitions with the Kadist Foundation in Paris, in collaboration with the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), around the transformations of the Japanese art scene after Fukushima. This long-term project also takes the form of a doctorate, in which I am more specifically interested in women artists who are rooted in territories marked by disasters and struggles related to ecology. 

The exhibition you have created, Les Êtres Lieux, opened on 23 June at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris. What are the main themes of the exhibition? 

This exhibition aims to bring together several generations of artists from different geographical origins, who all have a link with Japan, and whose work is strongly rooted in a territory. It questions how their living environments inform and transform their artistic practices, through different media. Les Êtres Lieux thus presents the work of artists, some of whom are strongly marked by environmental crises, others by the emotional or historical ties that link them to these fragile environments, whether at a family or a community level. 

Who are the artists being exhibited? What kind of works can we expect? 

The exhibition brings together four artists, each with a different medium of expression. The idea is to articulate these practices to see how they interact and complement each other. For example, there is a photographic archive by Tazuko Masuyama, a farmer and innkeeper whose work is being presented for the first time in France. She documents life in a mountain village in the central region of Japan. It was a project to build a dam that made her decide to pick up her camera, to capture something of this territory before it disappears, as a form of resistance to oblivion. Over 35 years, she took nearly 100,000 photographs. It is an invaluable testimony to the life of a village, based on community principles, and a universal story of how human activity can completely change an environment.

Also included is a video installation by Amie Barouh, a young Franco-Japanese artist who has made a montage from family archives. Contre-Chant questions how childhood is anchored in places and resonates with a collective destiny.

Sara Ouhaddou, who is Franco-Moroccan, works between the Moroccan Atlas and the Aomori region in northern Japan. Her piece Atlas/Aomori stems from an investigation into the earliest pictographic forms, and thus sets these two territories in motion, taking signs and symbols from different geographies to bring them into dialogue.

Finally, Yukihisa Isobe, born in 1935, is a pioneering artist on the issue of ecological planning. The exhibition features his work Energy of the City of Paris, part of a longer series entitled Ecological Context, a kind of subjective cartography that reminds us of our coexistence with the natural elements. 

You are also preparing a thesis on the place of ecofeminism in Japanese contemporary art, in the light of the triple disaster of Fukushima. How did you become interested in this subject? 

In Japan, I realised how little visibility is given to women artists. From this observation was born the idea of drawing a kind of genealogy between contemporary art forms and the history of Japanese women's social struggles. These movements, which are notably linked to environmental disasters, are similar to forms of ecofeminism - even if this term is not really theorised in Japan - because they articulate the same struggle against the domination of women and nature. 

Since your residency at Villa Kujoyama in 2011, Japan seems to play an increasingly decisive role in your work. How has your vision evolved in this respect? 

Since my early research in Japan, I have been interested in practices that are very much rooted in nature. This is also linked to the Japanese cosmogony itself, to the way it takes into account the living environment at different scales. At the same time, Japan operates at two very different speeds, since it is also a very economically developed and highly urbanised country. Artists who invest in nature are therefore also in opposition to this second model. This is an observation that I was able to make as early as 2011, and which has largely been confirmed. In retrospect, I would say that perhaps the question that has always interested me is how Japan is "at the forefront" of what is likely to happen on a global scale with the succession of disasters that the country has experienced over the last century. The Japanese artists I work with have a particularly acute awareness of the fragile and ephemeral dimension of our living environments.