Hakanai Sonzai

Continuing his photographic work on resilience, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac travelled to Japan in 2020, a country that had experienced the Fukushima tsunami and where the people do not talk much about their emotions and their psychological and intimate concerns. He set out to criss-cross the country and meet the people whose lives have been turned upside down by the earthquake. The photographer produced portraits in natural light, like mental images told by the subjects themselves and imagined by the artist. These colour scenes, where time seems suspended, are punctuated by B&W images evoking nature and the impermanence of things. An essay by Michel Poivert explores this body of work, linking the obsolescence of the photographic medium to that of our modern societies, with Japan at the heart of the drifts of the Anthropocene. The Musée Guimet will be presenting an exhibition of this work in the autumn.