Ayako  SAKURAGI

Ayako Sakuragi


 

Memories of a voyage without images

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Following the event of the great earthquake of East Japan, Ayako Sakuragi in 2011 suddenly decided to change her design career to devote herself entirely to what seems to be essential: her artistic research, the photographic exploration of life's little unnoticed events. She works with films and sténopé (pinhole photography).

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The so-called avant-gardist, those of the beginning of the 20th century were very concerned with the infinitesimal and the imponderable. Marcel Duchamp wondered about the potential thickness of cast shadows while Émile Malespine dreamed of weighing writings and kisses, and Francis Picabia doubted which was heavier, day or night. It is wrong to consider those questions extravagant. 

The one who heard one day in the mountains the echo of her own voice wondered for the first time what the speed of sound was such as modern artists do. But there is nothing infinitesimal and imponderable aside from our own perception. "All our systems of knowledge, all our science, our philosophy and most of all our certainties, doubts, eternal truths and ignorances are closely adjusted to this average altitude of five feet and seven inches to which we carry our own head above the surface of the ground”*. It is from this very simple observation that Jean Epstein developed his beautiful theory "The Intelligence of a Machine".

The microscope, the telescope, the camera, the tape recorder each in their own way think differently than we do about dimensions, time or the lack of it and give us a different perspective otherwise inaccessible in the limited spectrum of our senses. 

In Jean Epstein's time, the extension of our perception was done with analog tools: what was beyond our reach left, through a lens, a concrete mark on a chemical emulsion or through a membrane, a furrow on wax or a magnetic band. For about thirty years, sounds and images have been digital, the progress induced is immense, but it is not absurd to affirm that it is part of knowledge not of objective perception.

Music lovers prefer above all the sound of vinyl records read by a needle and movie enthusiasts a 35 mm film. The images of the James Webb telescope fascinate because we believe they are photographs which they are not: they are data re-arranged in images, the colors are arbitrary, the result of a convention between astronomers. 

A data spreadsheet of numbers however skilfully manipulated will never make us feel like the scar left by light on a photosensitive plate, it is because she is an artist that Ayako Sakuragi invented small, primitive machines to explore the unnoticed interstices of our daily lives, those which we never observe: cardboard envelopes filled with photographic film, carefully sealed but pierced in their center with a tiny hole that photographers call sténopés (pinhole photography). They are not propelled into intergalactic space, but delivered to the less surprising vagaries of the postal services, thanks to which they travel from one continent to another. To the question “what does it feel like to be a letter? ", Ayako Sakuragi's envelopes give an answer in real images, captured from the sorting table: those of the films, carefully developed which contain the luckiest envelopes after return to the sender. We are facing travel memories devoid of clichés even if, here and there we clearly recognize something, an object that has traveled around the world without anyone even noticing it. "The immaterial pictorial sensibility" would have said Yves Klein who, one day, when he was traveling from Paris to Nice, fixed on the roof of his car a canvas coated with pigments, for the sole and only purpose of taking the imprint of the wind and the rain...                                                ( Didier Semin )

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