Aurora
Yohei Yamakado
Curated by João Pedro Amoriim
Opening 22nd Sep
Until 21st Oct
Sala MoCap
Free Entrance
 

The room was dark.
On this night, when all cows are not black, furnished with nothing more than red chairs, a whispering silence in the distance, flickers of a memory that forgets itself.
Before the scene, the shadow of two suspended curtains, dyed in burgundy, framed by a few motifs in fine gold, therefore ordinary and almost insignificant, so to speak, in the shadow of Venice, appeared fragilely, shimmered insensibly—a slightly silvered white rectangular surface.

Suddenly, the sound of footsteps.
A child climbs the stairs, crosses the room, with a flower in his hand—delicately, it seems, or with the delicacy we have when caring for a newborn, or a not-yet-born, like an unrevealed film reel (above all, one must not imitate the prince or the idiot: Ah, zut!). As if the flower were proof of his passage, as if it were his ticket in or out.
He climbs higher and higher, smiling, breathing, and murmuring melodiously, in a rather singular, trembling voice:

Beyond a vast aurora
So that its flight may return toward
Your small hand that does not yet know itself
I marked this wing with a verse.

Reaching the top, finally, he stops before the door, turns indifferently, then shouts very joyfully, kindly—it was a shout, certainly, but not the kind that resembles a reckoning, not at all, but rather the kind we know as simple, simply very kind, even very gentle, perhaps born of tender games, the rules of which, incidentally, we do not know—with a youthful, modest, slightly pharaonic smile:

Beware, you! The margin of the undefined!

Now, silence returns, whispering. And from this returning, ever-distant whispering silence, which seems to last a very, very long time, to the point where time seemed to merge with space, in this room plunged into darkness, voices gradually emerged—not narrating, but narrative; those neutral voices that tell the work from that placeless place where the work itself falls silent. And there, from the depths of that slightly silvered white rectangular surface, suspended before the scene between the two bureaucratic curtains, which remains calm, silent, modest, yet at the same time seemingly useless, indifferent, unbothered—from there, from this slightly silvered white rectangular surface, these voices came, these voices were heard, without roughness, without names, as if they themselves, as if their material—the words, the breaths, and their interstices—had long been buried, buried forever.

— The Countess (I cannot remember her without this old title) once told me a story similar to this one:

When I find myself here, as I remain like this, I can see the sea; and that pleases me greatly. As for what delights me during the day, let’s see, perhaps it is the moment when I see the sunset behind the palm forest over there.

Yet, when she said this, there was no shadow of sadness, no sign of fatigue on her face. Rather, I thought I saw, as in the past, something even blooming.
The Countess spent her days in a purely white yet somewhat shadowy room, lying on a wisteria-colored chair during the day, knitting, reading, feeding a bird of a strange tropical breed, or occasionally offering me a glass of Western liqueur.
Her husband would join for meals.
During my long journey in the South, I never again had the luck to find such an admirable cuisine as hers—only in that moment.

— When I returned to Tokyo, I wanted to go to a café.
A true Tokyo café, if such a thing exists, would be for me a café in a side street of Ginza, where, every summer night, until midnight, S. Nagai Kafu and S. Kojiro Soyo regularly met, avoiding the fierce mediocrity of modernity, now definitive—this was well after the Kanto earthquake, when landscapes were disfigured, the original inhabitants buried (S. Tanizaki Junichiro had moved to Kansai, etc.), and the city, already overcrowded since their childhood, became even more so, now filled with new provincials and countryfolk (mind you, this was not the end).

Sitting on the tiny and temporary terrace, furnished with nothing but two chairs, a whispering silence in the distance, flickers of a memory that forgets itself, in the shade of a lush green ginkgo tree, fresh, enjoying coffee still warm (S. Nagai found iced coffee—so fashionable, so beloved by famous people—absurd, or a symptom of contemporary absurdity, since to delight in nature, one must respect it, even on a sensory level; it must be warm).
That taste was even more distant, from a country far away, near South America.
And the café was called, I believe, Mansa-tei.
It disappeared shortly after.

The name S. Nagai Kafu appears at times, at least as much as that of S. Tanizaki Junichiro, in the personal diary of a Tokyo film director, employed by the Shochiku company—probably the most Lubitschian of all time in the country’s then-thriving film industry, which once existed and has now disappeared.
He, the author, among other films, of A Woman of Tokyo, a deeply noir film, moving, overwhelming even, set in a highly eclectic, if not outright Hollywoodian, decor, featuring some remarkably beautiful tracking shots, was, like most of his colleagues then, an ardent reader, a great lover of literature.

Tuesday, April 4, 1936

Good weather, despite gusts of wind. The troops left to requisition pigs and vegetables. Took a bath in the morning. We shared yokan among ourselves. It was very good with fine tea. Yesterday, I traded with the troop commander—Kikunoya roasted rice, cherry blossom incense, for Ruby Queen tobacco. Though damp, it was welcome.

I witnessed a disturbing scene on the road from Anyi to Fengxin. Away from the Jingan crossing, at a junction of three roads, lay piles of rebel and native corpses. Near one of them, a baby, who must have just left its mother's womb, was playing with a bag of dry bread. Blood had drained from its eyelids and coagulated on its chin; its face seemed serene, as if it had cried itself out. The man in blue beside it seemed to be its father. The scene was so unbearable that, before it cried again, I quickened my pace. We were advancing on the enemy: there was no way to tend to it.

Suddenly, light struck.
Light struck strongly from behind. As always, fortunately.
And on the slightly silvered white rectangular surface—no longer so, now colored and reanimated, reanimated differently, because there were images, moving images—landscapes were projected, overlapping, insignificant, anonymous, nameless, upon which another image gradually emerged: the figure of a flower in motion.

We think: Is it a flower? No, we do not think it.

A flower, modest and beautiful, ephemeral and solitary—nothing but a flower, in motion, present. It was the presence of an instant, blooming and floral, a destiny—blooming and floral, a destiny, a destiny projected, in motion.

And as there is a flower, we see a flower, and we say we have a flower. Perhaps it was destiny itself—destiny in twenty-four frames per second.