HARD GREEN – photographic serie, 2016

Representation, imagination and reality – Tokyo

We move blindly.
As I wander, I see vegetation chained, caged, fleeing or resigned, protected or constrained by an accumulation of non-biological life that nonetheless seems to share an intimate existence with that blade of grass.

Mother by Pink Floyd comes to mind:
“…Under her wing she won’t let you fly but she might let you sing…”

Vegetation becomes bodies.
Existences in conditions of constraint – visible or invisible – striving, with all their energy, to break through, to cross a line, to open a space.

A flash: hundreds of children in a warehouse sewing small toys.
Then the stench of thousands of chickens pressed together, held up by one another, unable to stand.
And immediately after, Mrs. Maria on my landing, alone and old like the contraption that supports her.

The same image fractures.

The cage that seemed an obstacle may be protection.
The branches reaching upward may be escape or exposure.

A cactus emerges.
Effort, or ecstasy?
The same gesture.
The viewer decides – or perhaps not.

I close my eyes.
What represents that fragment of existence are fingers on the strings of a guitar.

Or smell.
Or touch.
Perhaps what we call interpretation is only a veil we lay over the world.
And perhaps imagination and interpretation coincide, at the very point where we stop distinguishing.

Then I ask myself:
what if I had to represent the Divine?

Stay Vivid.