eugenio nuzzo

/ shiroishi tatebankos

This project was realized together with Sanae as part of the Shiroishi-Zao Art Residency, in Shiroishi, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.

We were immediately enraptured by the discovery of « tatebanko », a traditional (and more or less forgotten) paper art form.
Widely common in the Edo period, these were prints filled with a large number of different size/scale elements (buildings, characters, trees, objects,…) in a seemingly chaotic and unorganized manner.
These posters could be cut and reassembled to recreate, through a sort of « tromp l’oeil maquette » (or volume axonometry), a scene of everyday life, or the reconstruction of battles, myths and legends.

Upon arriving in Shiroishi, where we were to stay for 24 days, we noticed a significant number of abandoned buildings in the city center. Most of them were shop-houses or workshop-houses, closed down as commerce has shifted to suburban shopping malls. Speaking with local residents, we learned how the financial power and attractiveness of large cities have dramatically emptied Japan’s provinces, where it is increasingly difficult to find people between the ages of 20 and 40.

Faced with this situation, we built a photographic archive of these buildings and then imagined re-inhabiting some of them on paper, through a series of fantasy micro-fictions that took the form of tatebanko posters.