ヴィクトワール・ティエレ

Victoire Thierrée

Victoire Thierrée discovered the island of Okinawa through the work of photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu (1930-2012) during her first visit to Japan in 2012. Tōmatsu was the first to document the American military presence on Okinawa, leading in 1969 to the publication, Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa, a title to which the series of photographs and the exhibition refer directly — like a cry.
In 2019, she explores this territory where thirty-two American military bases remain and 10,000 GIs are still present on the island. She produced a series of black and white photographs with a medium-format 6 x 9 (vertical) camera, focusing on the outskirts of the bases, where majestic nature seems to offer a form of resistance to this occupation. This first series marks the beginning of a wider exploration. In 2023, she traveled to the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to research botanist Egbert H. Walker (1899-1991), who directed a major post-war project in the Ryūkyū Islands. In 1951, he supervised the collection of more than 8,000 plant samples from areas marked by the violent fighting of the Battle of Okinawa (April 1 - June 22, 1945). From these archives, Victoire Thierrée has selected forty herbarium plates, which she has photographed.
The exhibition “Okinawa!!” brings together photographs taken between Japan and the United States, as well as a series of glass sculptures. They are inspired by Akira Yoshimura’s novel, Dying for the Fatherland (1967), in which we follow the descent into hell of fourteen-year-old Shinichi Higa, enlisted in an Okinawan battalion, just like the one thousand seven hundred and eighty pupils from the archipelago’s schools. These sculptures represent eyes exorcised by what they have seen.