'If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object ... I can also - though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) - isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.'
- Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs.
We will be working as artists-in-residence in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing throughout the month of August. We will use this time to take stock of our recent trip to Japan, where we visited a number of carefully selected sites in Japan – from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the hyper-futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka – to perform a sequence of actions or ‘live drawings’ in response to the spatial and material qualities of each location. These actions were recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using two hand-held and two miniature high definition video cameras. This experience and our response to it throughout the residency will culminate in an exhibition at the start of September.