OMOIDE

This project, developed during the Jogon in International Artists Residency in Japan in 2025, originates from three photographs found in an old album purchased at the flea market of the Heian Shrine. Inside, the almost vanished images re emerged as traces of what once happened, revealing fragments of lives suspended on the threshold of disappearance.

Among them were two portraits of a boy and a girl; when separated from the paper, their names appeared on the reverse, Eiji and Reiko Ishidáhara, together with a date: 1943, two years before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Building on these images, the project unfolds as a reflection on the fragility of memory and the persistence of light. The portraits were fragmented and printed in cyanotype on sixty four shikishi boards each, a traditional Japanese support used for calligraphy and poetry. The number is not incidental; the sixty four fragments correspond to the sixty four days the process lasted, so that each piece records a minimal variation of light, turning the image into a silent diary of time.

A third photograph, taken in a girls’ school from the same period, shows hundreds of pupils arranged on a staircase. Each barely visible face has been enlarged and printed in cyanotype inside Alzheimer’s medicine boxes.

Connected by red threads that evoke the Japanese legend of the akai ito, the invisible thread said to bind those destined to meet, they form a network of ties between past and present In this space, light, time and matter intertwine to resist oblivion, giving form to what continues to look back at us from the heart of the images.