京都芸術大学 × 京都市立芸術大学

KUA × KCUA

Unclaimed Voices
Kyoto University of the Arts / Kyoto City University of Arts

John Miura / Sayaka Nakamura
Kota Kubo / Rain Takahashi
Hiyo Morita / Sennosuke Tanaka

In French, a sudden silence is said to be “an angel passing through” (Un ange passe). When this silence comes to me from time to time, I wonder whether it is truly an angel.

We often speak too much about our neighbors through attributes such as gender, nationality, and religion. These frames of perception can help us understand others, yet they also risk pressing individual lives into a paved road called “narrative,” laid out in advance.

Before we know it, we find ourselves drawn into structures of conflict we never chose, compelled to declare our attributes and draw lines of division. Does that irresistible pull sound familiar? The distance between you and me can be torn apart beyond repair. In the powerlessness of being placed on one side of a divide regardless of our own will, can we still step onto another path?

If only those deemed the same are allowed to be called “we,” then that is nothing other than following the path laid down by powerlessness. If the existing form of “we” is already failing, then by what imagination can those who have been separated ever meet again? How can a “we” that holds difference within itself be possible?

In this exhibition, two participants from each university come together and continue a process of making from their own private places, using the faint light kindled by “conversation” and by “the inability to speak.” What emerges there as friendship, to put it directly, is the act of overlapping the world with what appears at the point where two lines of sight run side by side, and remaining quietly within the abstraction of that shared time. It is something different from simply “straining to see difference”; rather, it is an experience akin to a “second sight” born from tuning two original landscapes against one another. When I think of the possibility that such a weak passage may once have opened between myself and another person, I find myself remembering, alone, a path through which we could once see farther by borrowing your sight.

If the silence brought by the angel is a metaphor for time gradually being filled with something other than powerlessness, then beyond where the angel has passed there must be a kind of brightness that appears only when the eyes grow accustomed to a darkness that refuses to come into focus. From the place where the various colors of light dotting this darkness intersect, the signs of a “we” that has so often failed to be spoken begin, faintly, to appear.

《 KG＋ACADEMY Project 》