Eye to Eye is a series of multi-channel video installation works that visualizes the process of communication that begins with the act of facing one another, beyond social attributes or fixed identities.
Rather than treating encounters between people as singular events, the work understands them as ongoing, repeatedly enacted processes—akin to performative acts—through which relationships are gradually formed.
What the camera records is not the outcome of an event, but the time in which encounters accumulate. Filming is positioned as a method for remaining continuously involved in the process of meeting others, allowing relationships to unfold through repetition, duration, and shared presence.
Based on the understanding that social realities—including those shaped by political, cultural, and historical conditions—cannot be grasped from a single perspective, the installation space is composed of multiple video channels and sound. Through this multi-channel structure, different viewpoints coexist simultaneously, preventing the viewer from being positioned within a single, fixed narrative.
The project takes place at Colégio Sant’Ana, a school in Shiga Prefecture attended by children who migrated from Brazil to Japan.
Founded in 1998 by Kenko Nakata, a second-generation Japanese Brazilian educator, the school serves approximately fifty children ranging from infancy to eighteen years old. Operating with minimal institutional support, the school exists largely outside formal educational frameworks. Many of the children and teachers have limited opportunities to engage with the surrounding local community, and language barriers further shape their daily experiences.
Invited in 2022 to serve as director of an art project connecting the school and the local community, the artist has continued to work collaboratively with the children, teachers, and residents over time. Through these sustained engagements, the project seeks to visualize the time and actions through which relationships are gradually formed beyond social and cultural attributes.
Beginning with the video portrait Eye to Eye, which captures the simple yet fundamental act of looking at one another, the project has expanded into a series of installations—from Side:A to On the Other Side of the Door (Side:D)—presented between 2022 and 2024. These works explore the conditions and relational dynamics that emerge when people face one another, revealing how encounters unfold across time and shared space.
The latest work in the series, Eye to Eye, Side:E, is a four-channel video installation composed of scenes from Knots Art Festival at Colégio Sant’Ana — See, Draw, Play Music, Eat, and Sometimes Dance: An Art Festival that Connects Everyone, held on November 1–2, 2025.
In contrast to previous initiatives that focused on bringing children into the surrounding community, this festival marked a shift toward welcoming local residents into the school itself. Participants included members of the Brazilian community connected to the school, supporters, artists belonging to the artist’s collective, collaborators from past art projects, volunteers, and members of the public. Together with the children and teachers, they collectively shaped the festival over the course of the event.
The video work reconstructs fragments of these moments, assembling them into a multi-layered visual and sonic environment.
As multiple screens appear simultaneously, viewers are not confined to a single position but are instead situated within a field of intersecting relationships.
The exhibition space and headphones feature a soundscape composed of multiple layers: sounds accumulated through the sound workshop Small Movements, Big Songs: A Forest That Connects, led by Oro Min-kyung, who traveled from Korea for the festival; recordings made during a week spent at the school with the children; ambient sounds from Lake Biwa and the surrounding Shiga landscape; and audio from Eye to Eye, Side:A (2022) and other video works presented in the exhibition. As these sounds overlap, the accumulation of relationships extends throughout the space.
The mural created during the project also centers on performative collaboration.
By tracing a human figure together from both sides, the act of bodily cooperation itself becomes a core element of the work.
“Eye to Eye”—the act of facing one another—can never be done alone.
Making the festival together, creating murals that cannot be drawn individually, and layering sounds and time accumulated by many people all function as attempts to give form to situations in which encounters continue to emerge.
