Video Routes: Yu Araki, Hikaru Suzuki & Franca Malfatti
From Hikaru Suzuki and Franca Malfatti, Video Letter Exchange between Buenos Aires, Argentina and Fukushima, Japan, 2020, 28 min, sound, color
In July, to coincide with the release of our Video Letter Exchange between artists Nadia Hironaka, Shinpei Takeda, Hikaru Suzuki and Yu Araki as part of our Community of Images project, we are thrilled to present to our members two more works from the participating artists, Yu Araki and Hikaru Suzuki with his collaborator Franca Malfatti. Both works use video as a means of making imagined journeys between remote locations: Araki’s ROAD MOVIE (2014) documents a “road trip” performed with a fast-food menu, while in Suzuki and Malfatti’s video letter, its authors exchange fragments of their outer and inner lives in the year 2020.
With their themes of rerouted and belaboured communication, the two works invite us to question the meaning of the “video letter,” a term which seems to contradict a linear history of media. Suzuki and Malfatti’s film presents the possibility of a video communication marked by reticence and duration, while the journey undertaken in Araki's film echoes the historical flattening of space made possible by the infrastructure of globalization, including networked media. For Araki, a former English-Japanese interpreter, and Suzuki, who has made many films about his hometown of Fukushima, issues of locality, translation and exchange are central to their work.
The Video Letter Exchange will have its first screening at Bartram’s Garden, Philadelphia on July 19th.
CCJ’s Community of Images programming is generously supported by Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.
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THE PROGRAM WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON CCJ’S VIEWING PLATFORM.
This Members Viewing program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation.
Program
Yu Araki, ROAD MOVIE, 2014, 15 min, HDV, color, silent.
A video documentation of performance done in Skagastrond, Iceland’s only restaurant, Grill 66. The restaurant’s menu are hamburgers and pizzas all named after cities and towns along the famous U.S. Route 66, which was then very important road for the American industry as well as road trips. Inspired by the Americanization found in a remote fishing village, Araki coordinated a one-night event at the end of his three-month filmmaking residency stay, where four non-Americans attempt to consume the entire 25-piece menu in one sitting, hence achieving the fastest road trip ever made from Chicago (bacon burger) to Hollywood (beef steak sandwich). A DVD of this video is currently archived in the village’s library, as the only record of eating competition that has ever taken place in the history of Skagastrond.
Hikaru Suzuki and Franca Malfatti, Video Letter Exchange between Buenos Aires, Argentina and Fukushima, Japan, 2020, 28 min, sound, color
As part of a workshop run by Nele Wohlatz at the University of the Arts Hamburg, this series of video letters was sent from April to August 2020 between the filmmakers’ respective hometowns of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Fukushima, Japan. Their contents extends from the artists’ somewhat restricted daily lives during COVID, to their dreams, anxieties, and explorations of their local environment. In Suzuki’s case, his hometown of Fukushima sustained severe damage in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which is a recurring subject in his wider work. “All of a sudden, I found myself participating in an attempt to make a video letter without leaving my room,” he writes. While the letters are mostly filmed in a single location, they in part take place in digital space, building up an impression of three-dimensional intimacy with their “writers.”
Yu Araki
Yu Araki majored in sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and furthered his studies at the Graduate School of Film and New Media Studies, Tokyo University of the Arts (Japan). As a failed English/Japanese interpreter, his central theme has been revolving around the idea of mistranslation and misunderstanding in intercultural contexts, in which he explores “difference” via reenactment, remake and reanimation. Recent exhibitions include venues such as Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2024), Towada Art Center (2023), C-LAB (Taipei, 2023), Pola Museum of Art (Kanagawa, 2020), Shiseido Gallery (Tokyo, 2019), and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2019). His films have been screened at Institute of Contemporary Arts, FIDMarseille, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and many more. During 2017-18, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Araki was selected as one of the finalists for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019. He won the Special Prize in the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023 Commission Project for his video installation “Unmasked (Bootleg)” about a Japanese KISS tribute band named WISS. http://yuaraki.com/
Hikaru Suzuki
Hikaru Suzuki has been in the Doctoral Program of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts since 2023 and researches the Development of “Essay-Film“ in the Western and Non-Western Worlds. He participated in a video letter project initiated by Dir. Nele Wohlatz in Germany with an artist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during Covid 19 era in 2020. The video letter project between Buenos Aires and Fukushima, Yokohama" was selected for the "35th Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Buenos Aires)". Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has made it his life's work to film the people and transformation of Landscape of Fukushima, and continues to do it. He is currently working as an organizer and programmer for the Japanese screening organization "Experimental Film Culture in Japan" since 2019.
Franca Malfatti
Franca Malfatti is an editor and filmmaker. She graduated in Image and Sound Design from the University of Buenos Aires and in Film Editing from the Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica. In 2019 she was invited to be part of the Mezcal Jury at the International Film Festival in Guadalajara. In 2020 she was selected to participate in the Film Program of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella directed by Andrés Di Tella. Her work has been showcased at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival.
She currently works as an audiovisual editor specializing in the documentary genre.
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
This exhibition is on show at Philadelphia Art Alliance from June 14 - August 9.
The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.