共通: 年度: 2022

＊This is a translation of an interview originally published in the Tokyo Artpoint Project annual report Artpoint Reports 2022→2023 (March 25, 2023).

What kind of year was 2022 for people working in the cultural sector? Mori Tsukasa describes the gradual recovery from the pandemic and his attitude toward the future.

Instead of Responding, the Courage to Take the First Step Forward

Q. What kind of year was it for people running cultural projects in Tokyo?

Over the past two years, cultural projects were forced to remain on standby due to the pandemic, always having to respond to a seesawing situation. But in 2022, international and domestic travel rebounded and, if we put aside for now the issue of changes to how we record infection numbers, society nonetheless seemed to transition more fully into a mode in which COVID is accepted as a fact of life. Under such circumstances, people in the cultural sector had to adopt a mindset of “let’s take the first step forward.”

In September, it was announced that Tokyo would host the 2024 Deaflympics, a multi-sport event for deaf athletes. Looking ahead to this, Tokyo Metropolitan Government formulated the Tokyo Cultural Strategy 2030 in March, which will steer cultural policy for the next few years. It advocates building an environment in which anyone can enjoy arts and culture. I am involved in Creative Well-being Tokyo, an initiative by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture to promote this. It feels like we’re seeing an acceleration socially in efforts to hold cultural programs more open to different sorts of people by improving accessibility that is grounded in diverse backgrounds.

Q.Well-being will become increasingly important. How do you define or understand its principles?

Well-being is not an easy thing. People are physically different, they are different ages. Though the conditions for what makes someone “well” vary, society still fundamentally functions on the basis of competition. Disability is something that arises from an individual’s relationship with society, so if we truly want to achieve well-being, then we have to recognize individual diversity. Well-being and diversity are interrelated issues.

Diversity was originally something that culture excelled at. Recently, more and more people in the hard-pressed medical and health care sector want to make use of cultural diversity. But culture has become so fixated on conventional values that it can no longer respond to the demands of other sectors. This is a major challenge that we face.

Last year, something really eye-opening happened: a social worker at a community support center for people with dementia told me that instead of programs for people with dementia, they rather want places where people with dementia can go. In other words, instead of direct support for people affected by something, somewhere that just accepts whoever comes and should a problem arise, professionals are on hand to deal with it. When I heard this, I realized how presumptuous it would be for people in the cultural sector to do something intentional, and that we must first accept people and gain experience, that it’s about getting used to things rather than worrying. Dementia is not something really special, there are already lots of people living with it, so it’s first about accepting them. We need to have a certain flexibility to change through that experience and that’s the kind of meaning included in the mindset of “let’s take the first step forward.”

Emulsifying Culture and Other Sectors

Q. In 2022, were there any projects where you sensed that kind of flexibility?

Yes, in Metote Lab, KINO Meeting, and Karoku Recycle, which all kicked off in 2022. For example, Metote Lab tries to develop new ways of communicating. The members had things they wanted to do but weren’t sure how to go about doing it. They just had to very consciously “wander around.” They went to meet lots of people, talk to them, come into contact with things, fail, and gradually make progress. It was a fine way to wander.

Unlike entertainment, which heads toward a fixed goal, art projects feel self-propelled at certain moments. I think a project is working well when it seems to be carrying you along with it. You become nurtured by your own project.

The three projects I just mentioned all feel like that, and I think it’s related to the qualities of the people involved. Signers are central to Metote  Lab, while KINO Meeting’s Abe Kota is a designer who spent time doing research on the streets of Brazil, and Karoku Recycle’s NOOK is a team of people who spent ten years working in Tohoku after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, deepening their relationships with others whose experiences differ from their own. In both a good and bad way, artists who act spontaneously are self-reliant, while the NOOK team is, in a good way, reliant on others. Interacting with these project organizers, I got a sense of a new kind of project organizer, one who opens themself up to others and changes through that relationship.

Q. Are initiatives appearing that don’t rely on preexisting forms of art?

Yes. I think 2022 was a year that saw increasing expectations for culture from people not from so-called art fields. Put another way, unless we try to understand the reason such people now have expectations about culture, conventional mindsets in the cultural sector will become dated very quickly. Let’s presume that people from the art world have areas they regard as their forte, but the people now newly interested in art see its appeal in different areas. We have to discard our preconceived notions and values or these two sides will remain incompatible.

The phenomenon of two liquids ordinarily not miscible—like water and oil—nonetheless blending together is called emulsification. The initiatives I mentioned before are examples of a kind of emulsification, where art and the everyday or other fields emulsify. The people involved are perhaps not even conscious that they are creating art. But for me, contemporary art is the attempt to explore and aspire for such intermixtures that they intuitively sense are possible.

Strategies to Make Culture as Shelter

Q. Are society’s expectations of art and culture growing?

There seems to be momentum. It feels like we are living in a time of unprecedented expectation for culture as something socially engaged, as something more valuable that what we consume or own. But after the two world wars of the twentieth century, culture also really blossomed, so perhaps something bad is lurking behind this momentum. In other words, lots of people have an animalistic intuition that something is wrong and are starting to seek shelter in culture.

Culture is changing position and meaning, and becoming more and more necessary. In the midst of this, the question of how to run projects so that culture can function as a kind of shelter becomes important. At the risk of singing my own praises, I’m proud that Tokyo Artpoint Project has launched such initiatives while society is still healthy, and has assembled a versatile team and array of techniques.

On the other hand, given the extent to which society has changed, the ways in which we design projects also must change. More concretely, future planning has to embrace backcasting—meaning to identify a desirable future from the start and then work backward to decide how we act in the present. Because our previous experiences and precedents won’t serve as the foundation for achieving that.

At Tokyo Artpoint Project, as we have pursued our projects through a backcasting approach, we came to see the importance of having hypotheses and provable indices, and introduced process assessments. In order to arrive at the futures we envisage, we set a timeline of when we want to achieve what, review the situation and problems with our partners, and share things on an equal footing, and so endeavor to valorize the projects we do.

Of course, some cultural projects don’t fit that way of thinking. And that’s precisely why we have to resolve problems that can be resolved logically. The times are quite amorphous and unpredictable, so I want us to build the criteria and core of projects ourselves. As we shuttle back and forth between the vision of the future to which we aspire and the present reality that confronts us, I want to take steps forward, one at a time.

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Mori Tsukasa｜Director, Tokyo Artpoint Project (Arts Council Tokyo)

Project Coordination Division Chief, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Special Guest Professor, Joshibi University of Art and Design
Adjunct instructor, Tama Art University

Born in 1960 in Aichi, Mori Tsukasa worked from 1989 to 2008 at Mito Arts Foundation, where he was involved as a curator in the opening of Art Tower Mito’s Contemporary Art Center. He was responsible for curating various solo and group exhibitions, including Christo (1991), Tadashi Kawamata DAILY NEWS (2001), Katsuhiko Hibino: Hibino Expo 2005 (2005), and Tatsuo Miyajima | Art in You (2008).
In 2009, he joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, where is involved with running art projects in communities in partnership with nonprofits as the director of the intermediary support program Tokyo Artpoint Project, and also oversees the Tokyo Metropolitan Government & Tokyo Municipality Collaboration Project.
From 2011 to 2020, he was director of Art Support Tohoku-Tokyo, providing help to areas of northeast Japan affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake through arts and culture. From 2015 to 2021, Mori was project director for the official Tokyo 2020 Cultural Olympiad programs Tokyo Caravan and TURN. He is currently involved with promoting Creative Well-being Tokyo and improving the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture’s accessibility.

＊This is a translation of an interview originally published on November 15, 2022, on Tokyo Artpoint Project News, a blog on the Arts Council Tokyo website.

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Launched in 2022, KINO Meeting is an art project that organizes filmmaking workshops for non-Japanese people living in Japan.

The various participants form a film crew and head out into the streets. Wandering around Tokyo, they talk to each other, exploring their roots and their relationships with the areas and communities where they live, and eventually complete a film.

This project also aims to build a community through the collaborative activity of filmmaking, and research and develop a participant-led workshop program.

KINO Meeting’s name derives from the German word for cinema. It encompasses the concept of moving around while using the medium of film and moving image to encounter and engage in dialogue with a wide range of people over the course of the project.

KINO Meeting is run by Abe Kota, a designer also known for directing the film Whose city is it? about graffiti artists in four cities in Brazil. We spoke to him about how the project started and his activities to date.

Possibilities for Interacting with Others through the Act of Making

Q. How did KINO Meeting start?

I’ve worked with KINO Meeting co-organizer Arts Council Tokyo since 2020 on two programs for Tokyo Art Research Lab.

The first, in 2020, was Cross Way Tokyo: Involvement with People from Other Backgrounds through Self-Transformation. The other was Multicultural Film MakingーCreating a film together with people from different backgrounds in 2021. KINO Meeting is an extension of these two programs.

The departure point for these endeavors was my own personal uncertainty about wanting to communicate and interact with non-Japanese people but not knowing how to go about it, and so eventually chickening out. I reached out to others who had the same issue and tried to discuss with them precisely what was holding us back, and Cross Way Tokyo was the first result of this.

Q. You previously made a film, Whose city is it?, about graffiti artists in Brazil. When you work with migrants and foreign-born people in Japan, what kind of challenges do you experience?

I lived in São Paulo for half a year between 2018 and 2019. The streets are filled with people from all walks of life; it’s a real melting pot. Needless to say, the gap between rich and poor is very stark, and we can’t just say everything is great, but it was a city in which you can feel everyone’s individuality.

In Brazil, I was a traveler and a minority. When I came back to Japan with that on my mind, I now became aware that I was part of a majority and when coming into contact with people from other backgrounds, I felt very uncomfortable about even just trying to find out about the background of someone from a minority. It was like I was consuming their background, just enjoying it for kicks. The ignorance about lots of history that I felt when I was outside Japan also contributed to my hesitancy. In Cross Way Tokyo, I tried to share that anxiety with various others.

Concretely, the members of the project walked around the city, interviewing each other about how we felt when we came face to face with people from other backgrounds, and then we attempted to express that through different mediums, such as writing, photography, moving image, and so on. What I came to realize was that when it came to interacting with others, doing so through the act of making something was, for me, the most natural and full of potential. And so I started thinking about making a film with people from different backgrounds. This then led to the next project, Multicultural Film Making.

Aiming for Interesting Films, Proactively Made by Participants

The Multicultural Film Making workshop was split into two. First, the people with different backgrounds who applied to the open call walked around the city together. They separated into groups and interviewed each other about their backgrounds, roots, and feelings about Japanese communities, and then took photographs and filmed a documentary about each participant. This activity was called Cinema Portrait.

After that, Tei Ushin, who is from Taiwan and studied film at university, put these stories together into a script, which she then directed as a fiction film that everyone helped make.

Almost no one involved had any prior experience of making a film, but I gained many insights over the course of the shoot. Above all, the completed film, New Tokyo Tour, was just so interesting. The participants formed a community and I also sensed that our approach could be taken further in the future as a workshop methodology, and this led to me continuing it as KINO Meeting.

Q. Concretely, what were the possibilities you sensed about the collaborative activity that is filmmaking?

One of the biggest was when we held a screening and talk of the finished film at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and all the participants who appeared onstage seemed to have such fun. You can tell from the film that everyone was engaged in making it proactively and using their own initiative. This kind of multicultural program has a tendency to result in something in which the participants just follow the themes set by the organizers. But I felt that with our film, we were able to get beyond that.

During the making of the film, people were assigned a role like cameraman and so on, but everyone worked really hard because they all felt like the film was “theirs.” On a film set, there’s a director, so the conditions can never truly be equal for everyone in the most basic sense of the word. And yet, everyone sought out their own role and complemented each other’s efforts, triggering communication and a situation in which strangers came together to form a team.

Our aim was not just to make an equal community, but also make an interesting film. That we were able to do this as a team left me with the greatest sense of potential.

Entrusting Projects to Past Participants

Q. KINO Meeting launched in 2022 and held its first workshop in the Ikebukuro area in July. What did you do in the workshop?

KINO Meeting is very different from the previous projects in that it is held in various places around Tokyo. The first event took place in Ikebukuro and we recruited participants who felt attached to the area.

The workshop started with a Cinema Portrait done in groups of three. We then tried something new, where they watched the films each had made, and then did what we called “triangle interviews” in which the three participants would discuss what they had in common. Based on those things in common, they worked together to make a single film in the area—in the case of the first workshop, Ikebukuro.

They continued their discussions about the things they had in common, interviewed each other, and talked together about which shots they needed, and then filmed that on location. The editing was also done as a three. The workshop itself lasted four days, with the filming and editing done over three of the days and a screening on the final day. And then the next workshop takes place in a different location.

Q. What were the workshop participants like?

There were teams that had lively debates and others who were rather quiet. It was a really mixed bag. Given the short production schedule, we did worry, but ultimately three interesting films—Metamorphosis, Secret, Japan Standard Time—were completed. After the screenings, the participants got talking and didn’t want to leave. It felt like a valuable experience for them.

We also introduced another aspect, which was asking past Multicultural Film Making participants to be “workshop crew.” This was an intermediary role between the participants and us, leading the workshop activities. As people with experience and understanding of our ideas, they helped create the films with the participants.

Any arrangement in which the divisions between the members of the team are too sharply defined will result in filmmaking that feels like it doesn’t belong to you, and a workshop that is too formal, so I wanted to avoid this most of all. As such, I’m ultimately just a kind of master of ceremonies and don’t intervene in the creative process. KINO Meeting aims to involve people from past projects and sessions as workshop crew and subsequently in running things, in the hope that they eventually take a proactive role.

Q. It’s like the previous participants take part in subsequent sessions as mentors, forming a crosscutting community.

That’s right. Each group had a previous participant providing support, which naturally affected the finished works. I want to increase the amount of involvement such previous participants have in running the workshops, and so the project will evolve in ways that we cannot do by ourselves, which is a very interesting way for things to develop.

Providing a Frame for Making a Work That Goes Beyond Being an Experience

Q. You always call this finished videos “works.” Is there something you do so that the participants approach it like they are making a work of art, not just documentary footage?

I don’t want this project to end as just an experience. It’s not only about having fun with a professional camera; I want the participants to really make a film work that is interesting and will be well received by others. But a kind of structure is needed to bring that out, so I am always designing that from scratch. This is what really occupies our minds the most.

Concretely speaking, what we are doing is turning the process of making a film into a quite elaborate workshop. The participants interview each other and they film scenes where they are sitting around in the city, and so on. In terms of the order of which things are filmed or what needs to be done, it’s pretty systematic. It doesn’t actually allow for much freedom.

That framework or mold is a frame for the participants to see the city. If they want a shot of someone sitting in the city, they need to find a suitable place to sit. That is an important part of the program, prompting them to re-examine their relationship with the city.

The participants are all looking for whatever they find interesting within that “mold,” and there are groups that follow the rules, and also groups that ignore the rules and kind of go rogue, and that’s where things get really interesting.

We are still trying to figure out to what extent we should set rules or tolerate deviations from that framework. I actually relocated to Kochi this spring due to another production project, and am currently not closely involved with how things are arranged. The other members of the team are really trying their best and testing out lots of things. That process of adjustment will surely continue for some time.

Interesting Works Emerge from Noise (Alternative Perspectives)

Q. During the workshops and the conversations after the screenings, is there anything the participants said or did that made a particular impression on you?

This isn’t a representative example, but there was someone who was studying at art college in Japan. When she took part in a university social gathering for the first time, the Japanese students started waxing lyrical about old anecdotes from high school and she felt unable to participate in that conversation. She said she felt like she was being treated differently from everyone else, and that story has strangely really stayed with me.

This is a difficult matter to describe, but at a party or something like that, people with similar backgrounds are more likely to have a good time talking together, while people with different backgrounds can end up just being a kind of noise. This is the same at a workshop. Putting together an event aimed at people from overseas, with people who have backgrounds and positions that differ from your own, is actually very hard. It greatly increases the stuff you have to think about and running the workshop becomes complex.

But when this is a place to make something, the meaning of that difficulty changes. In a creative environment, “noise” becomes an alternative perspective. There is a dimension to it that improves a work, so that difficulty feels interesting. When the student told me that story, it instilled in me a renewed sense of the potential for the creative collaboration that we are trying to do. Opportunities for people with various perspectives to be proactively involved are necessary for society, but I also have a strong awareness in a more limited sense that such forums are essential for interesting works of art to appear.

Q. Watching the three films that the participants made, the viewer is filled with a sense of the strong fellowship in Japan that might lead society to exclude outsiders, and the issue of public space in which people are not allowed simply to be in the space. Given your experiences in Brazil, what do cities in Japan feel like to you?

Yes, the street culture in Brazil was quite a shock. Compared to that, Japanese street culture is indeed a bit of a letdown. On the other hand, there is also another problem in Brazil with the many homeless people who have been exploited and have nowhere to go. In that sense, I don’t think that Brazil is absolutely better per se.

More than anything, though, in Brazil I had a sense that individuals change the urban community. The individual seems weak in Japan but I also don’t think we should despair about that just yet. Artistic activities by foreign-born people in Japan can be an impetus to change that situation.

Though not directly related to KINO Meeting, I have moved to Kochi because I wanted to get involved with the Japanese government’s system of foreign technical intern trainees, something in which I long had an interest. A community revitalization group in the city of Tosa, Kochi, has made it their mission to promote exchange between the trainees and local residents, and I wanted to be involved with that.

Like collaborative filmmaking, this kind of exchange might help usher in the kind of street culture to which I aspire, even if only on a small scale. Modest though they are, those are my expectations for these efforts.

A Crew Community That Transcends Geography

Q. Finally, what are your future plans for KINO Meeting?

Something did not go so well with the previous workshop and that was how we positioned the city or community. We wanted to focus on that thematically and so we brought together people with some kind of feeling of attachment to Ikebukuro, but those feelings varied considerably among the participants. In fact, it felt like we confused the participants by making it about the urban community from the get-go. Someone said that the community would have appeared naturally in the films even without us intentionally specifying it from the start. The current challenge we face is how to deal with that.

In terms of the project overall, the workshop took place in Ikebukuro due to various circumstances like venue availability, but moving forward, I would like to change the project so that the fieldwork location and content of the workshop are more closely related, and each finished work differs depending on the place.

Also, I’m thinking about the community of the crew. We were fortunate with the Ikebukuro participants that some of them want to stay involved with the project in the future, so I now want to consider the best way for them to do that in terms of their position on the team and involvement in the planning.

Q. It would surely be a lot of fun if different kinds of participants came together and formed a caravan that transcends geography.

Absolutely. Ultimately, I hope we can hold workshops in a wide range of areas.

If we are able to build a collaborative mode of production that interacts with communities in various places and, as a result, staddles the members of a community, we might then be able to make a film. In that sense, I want to continue thinking about the possibilities for workshop programs in which the participants are proactively involved in running the events, and for new and interesting works made by people with all kinds of backgrounds.

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Abe Kota
Designer; Director, Pantanal
Born in 1986, Abe Kota worked at Hiromura Design Office before turning freelance in 2018 to pursue activities guided by design and cultural anthropology. From 2018 to 2019, he was based in São Paulo, where he organized various projects related to local street culture. In 2021, he released the film Whose city is it?. Alongside his main work as a graphic designer, he is also involved recently in research and art projects. In March 2022, Abe moved to Tosa in Kochi, where he is developing the Wakusei Project that aims to promote exchange between local residents and foreign technical intern trainees. Also from 2022, Abe has partnered with Tokyo Artpoint Project for KINO Meeting, which runs filmmaking workshops with foreign-born people in Japan.

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Interview and text: Sugihara Tamaki
Editing: Nagamine Mika
Photographs: Maeda Mitsu
Translation: William Andrews