The Performativity of Relationship and Encounter

People live within various frameworks such as nationality, culture, language, and social position.
Yet relationships between people are not determined by such attributes alone. They take shape gradually through shared time and place, through the act of facing one another.

Since 2001, long-term projects have been developed with people belonging to specific communities in schools and local areas where time is shared as part of everyday life. In the longest-running project, encounters have continued for more than twenty years. Within this shared time, social and situational changes are experienced together, and this ongoing process itself constitutes the work. Rather than emerging from isolated moments, these relationships take shape through sustained time, as encounters are repeated and lived through over extended durations. 

Since 2013, these projects have extended beyond the relationship between artist and participants, focusing instead on creating a field in which encounters emerge among participants themselves. The act of facing one another and sharing time is understood as a performative act through which people come to know one another.

The camera used in these projects functions not as a tool for producing results, but as a means of remaining engaged in a field where relationships continue to be generated and sustained. Images and moving images produced through this process do not explain the social or cultural backgrounds of those involved; rather, these backgrounds emerge as elements inherent in relationships formed through shared time and mutual presence.

Installation works composed of photographs, moving images, sound, and objects allow viewers to re-experience the processes of the project and to encounter them as a new field of relation.

This practice of attending to relationships as they are continuously generated and renewed offers an opportunity for people with diverse backgrounds to recognize one another’s individuality and to seek conditions for mutual understanding. It is an attempt to reconsider social prejudices and attribute-based frameworks—often treated as fixed—by thinking from the temporal process of relationship itself, through performative acts.