Eu nunca fui
Photography · 2023–2024
Eu Nunca Fui para o Japão stems from two years of research carried out by Romy Pocztaruk in places connected to the Japanese presence in São Paulo.
The artist traversed cultural associations, houses, saunas, temples, parks, museums, studios, festivals and the Mie Nishi Municipal Baseball Stadium — spaces in which practices, memories and forms of coexistence constitute a city within the city.
Developed before her first trip to Japan, the project does not seek to find, in São Paulo, a preserved origin nor to produce an inventory of cultural signs.
The research turns into staged scenes, constructed with characters and collaborators, in which objects, bodies, architectures and landscapes come to operate as elements of a fiction.
Between document and tableau, the photographs retain the materiality of the places visited, while at the same time displacing their temporal and narrative coordinates.
The series is organized around the three axes of ikebana — Shin (sky), Soe (human) and Hikae (earth).
Romy Pocztaruk · contato@romypocz.com · Instagram @romypocz