10 Questions with Kôichi Nabeshima

Kôichi Nabeshima is an artist in the audio-visual field who lives and works in Paris. His interest is the concept of art, analyzed by the phenomenalist idea and the interactive relationship between Nature and Humanity. The location chosen for his productions is essential to the inspiration and opportunities for improvisation that his creation requires. The societal aspect of the land, in that it separates nature from human society, allows him to understand the history of the cultural will for development by a man of the territory.

By dealing with banal images captured in daily life, digitally and on 16 mm film, he creates experimental films in various formats and installations, especially under the poetic composition, which gives spiritual vitality. Since 2018, his works have been presented in various exhibitions and screenings. His artistic motivation is to create the link between individual history and that of art by criticizing the aesthetic value that directs our sensitivity through community ideas.

koichinabeshima.com

INTERVIEW

First of all, tell our readers a little bit about you. Who are you, and how did you start experimenting with art?

I am an audiovisual artist who mainly makes video and film installations. I am someone curious about creation and thinking in general, especially because I admire poetry as an initial form of art and philosophy as a theory of criticism. I live and think to create, otherwise I do not exist.
I always wanted to become a film director since my childhood, but I started to think first about what I say in the story and what cinema is. After my study of philosophy and experience of jazz music in Japan, I began my work as an artist directly with only one camera through the influence of artists in experimental film. I came to Paris to make films and learn Western art history, working with my artist friends in an atelier. In particular, I learned about art at the museum, with great passion as I went to the Musée d'Orsay every day to analyze the artistic will of the painters.
I think that we don't need training to become an artist today because art is the individual's own expression, and there is no lack of technology for realization, and that's why I am still self-taught despite all the difficulties. It is neither god nor master but myself who obliges me to create.

What is your personal aim as an artist?

Like all great artists, I would like to be someone who influences all the other successors in the way that I propose solutions to certain problems in real society. I tell the fiction and the abstract figure, but I can't help thinking about the question of "truth". My direction as a thinker is aimed at those who exist in the real world because I must give a new way of seeing the phenomenon to me as other ancient artists did.
But this is not to force us to have the same idea as me, as we do in the political field; on the other hand, I want to say "no" to the wrong idea that we leave between our cultures. Art can touch on economics or ideology as a practice, religion or tradition as a motif, and science or history as a means of thought. Ultimately, the innovation of art perspective can be to change the current context in art history and humanism.

Can you tell us about your creative process? How do you go from the first idea to the final outcome? 

My work is to organize different images into a frame, with the aim of expressing reflective thinking from elements recorded in everyday life. The main problem that I develop is the following: how we can understand the specific life of the site, which has both cultural and natural aspects, through the contemporary perspective. I take the methodological anchor in three reflections to draw the concept detail.
The first is the inspiration of ideas and characteristics of the place. What gives us the sensation in daily life and what we see in the landscape? At this stage, it is necessary to analyze the construction of a society by observing the cultural traces of humans and, on the contrary, the natural things that remain to be the creators of the atmosphere in which we engage in work. Because the delimitation between nature and human society historically tells us our way of organizing life, of setting up a community surrounded by earthly existences. I interpret the past of the place in the way that we see human history in the desire to exploit, cohabit, and modify the original ground, and this point of view leads us to imagine the development of societal culture, which regularly enters into a relationship with wild spaces. History is thus understood by our attitude of living currently when we direct interest towards the composition of architecture in a vast natural environment. I record phenomena by looking for this specificity with the digital and film camera.
The second is the contribution of the first: the dynamism that we receive through observation, at the level of poetic creation which transfers the vitality given to the domain of story. Intuition carries opportunities to create the ontological link between Me and my environment, in the way in which I carry out the interpretation of images to create the concept. I convert meaning from data into creative ideas. The event, architecture, culture and all human heritage, which once merge into the flow of consciousness, will have to be recomposed in the language of banal life. By archiving recorded phenomena, I reconstruct stories about the place through poetic perspective, and provide the connection between each element through editing. This work is therefore done both through literary construction and the collage of distinct figures.
The last develops through the audiovisual mediation of thoughts in the form of the installation. In relation to theory, I keep my current problem which questions the interaction between time and light in the expression of art, citing ideas on temporality in phenomenology. In our awareness of visual art, the light most reduced to sensation, as a signal, hints at what is happening differently in our way of processing memory and thinking about time itself. I create a projection system with several screens in a space for the exhibition. Several films are projected in a loop with sound to create an opportunity for the viewer to experience the dynamism of the performances. The goal is to accomplish all the stages between the reflexive approach and the mediation of the films, and to create the system of evoking meaning through perception at the moment of installation.

Your statement mentions that the location chosen for your productions is essential to inspiration and improvisation. How do specific locations contribute to your creative process, and can you share an example of a project where the chosen location played a pivotal role in the final outcome?

I think about the final concept of my work absolutely during my stay in a specific place. This is to avoid the simple application of our dominant idea to what always exists. I start with the hypothesis about the understanding of the field, then I wait for unexpected things that come to me to rectify this initial hypothesis in the form of inspiration, finally, I can offer my reaction to both my ideas and to the current situation and it becomes improvisation when I create the form of idea through the act of creation. When I did an artistic residency in Gran Canaria, for example, people taught me that there always exists caves where prehistoric men remained, as if they lived there until yesterday. They were right next to the house where we were staying, and a historian pointed out several places in the mountain, saying that these caves are left untouched. He showed me archive photography that recorded the 20th-century view of this place. Photographic technology was apparently imported to Gran Canaria relatively late compared to other European countries, so there are not many records before the mid-19th century. In addition, archaeological work on the history of this island has not progressed well. Even in city museums, we show lots of objects without explanation, that we don't yet know where they come from.
I felt that we did not have the need to advance the archaeological project right away, and the habitation of ancient people is very slowly becoming the subject of science. On the other hand, we have always imagined their lives with great motivation, and we look at the past in everyday life, exactly as this sentence shows: "as people lived there until yesterday." In my creation, I wanted to leave this desire to imagine ancient life instead of explaining it. So I thought about why we took the landscape photo, looking at the archive. It is contemplation and looking towards our ancestors, and I created a story about these magnificent gestures. If I was not there, I could not know this spirit nor want to transmit it in my creation. Location is very important to me. Moreover, for the same reason, I do not consider photography alone as art, because it is only a recording which must await the external narrative.

Working with both digital media and 16 mm film, how do you choose between these mediums for your projects? What role do these different formats play in conveying the messages and emotions you aim to express in your experimental films and installations?

Digital work is essential for video collage. Thanks to this technique, I can program the projection rhythm of various images automatically. On the other hand, working with silver film helps me to intervene in the process of making images, that is to say, I can destroy the figure at the moment when images are born.
Where the digital process, therefore, shows the spontaneity of turning the video on and off at the exact moment, silver films give us the view of light making as the origin of representation. Both are to innovate our view that we obtain through the in situ experience indicated by the film.

How much of your personal life is reflected in your work? And how does it help you further develop your art?  

My personal life is the time when I can practice my expression. At the same time, I can observe the real and banal phenomena, like a street tree falling its leaves by the wind, a dog following me, a lady looking for the pharmacy, etc. In my opinion, the source and expression of art is already in life. You can create the same phenomenon in the installation, so I admire the performative side of my work. I just make art imitating reality.

On the same note, you express a motivation to create a link between individual history and the history of art, criticizing aesthetic values that direct our sensitivity through a community idea. How do you navigate this balance, and could you share an example where your work successfully achieved this connection between individual and collective perspectives?

Contemporary art in our time attaches itself to the masses in the form of dominant culture, as fat information that disrupts the formation of our ideas. Far from looking for the source of ideas at the fountain, we drown ourselves in laboratory liquid; man is formed at the same time by archaic knowledge. We do not let go of the temptation to disguise ourselves as seemingly superior to the fictional world, easily applying the borrowed speech of others, powerful and arrogant, regardless of the particular situation. In such a case, one will never be satisfied by consuming images until death. There is always something lacking in the museum, the exhibition hall, and even your little private room, as long as the sociopolitical and anthropological baby requests a meal from friends with anger for no reason.
Our isolation from subjectivity, as we temporarily forget where our feet are, is accomplished by the confinement of a single domain in the false materiality of art. The medium's material forces us to see a suggested side of a thing, ignoring other rich perspectives, and it forcibly consists of its infinitely legitimate right to print its image, separating itself from true experience.
All problematic ideologies come from there, including the separation between individual history and art history. The deceiver passes through the contaminated screen (I call it political plate), which pretends to be neutral and flat, missing the singularity in the organization of nature. What we see, however, is fundamentally the contribution of light. It functions, in the initial sense, as a transport of the human concept through the revelation of hidden existences; we never see politics, aesthetics, or morality. The genius of experimental film is that it has reached an understanding of the essence of light using diverse optical expressions. Its art shows both each specific subject and its origin indirectly in the way he creates the system of meaning. The signal in the object movement breaks the contour of appearance, and then our sight becomes the alternative phase of black (not seen) or white (seen) which will modify the way they appear on their own. Speed, or the way it manifests itself in the after-image, is what must be signified by cinematographic technique.
It is a solution to the problems of our time, which are a type of abuse of aesthetic value that we share as a long-term heritage. It's become very difficult to say what you personally like. To recover the possibility of the true enunciation of each person, we must first make materiality natural as an origin, because sensitivity is what the individual receives through the real phenomenon, not through the community perspective. In this way, I would like to divert the gap between the individual and collective perspective. And I admit that I have succeeded in part of this process, when people watch my film and try to understand its essence. They try to understand the meaning in pure sensitivity, that is to say, they create their new forms of thinking from the elements that I have given. We name what did not exist before without a pre-established code, so this is the artistic will that we share at the moment of projection.

What is your favorite experience as an artist so far?

When I invent a new concept for my work by chance, I love my creation. I often forget the process until then, but a new idea stays in my head for a long time like a stain in the canvas, and it is never understandable right away. My message is, therefore, never direct; rather, my expression is addressed to someone who needs it. And then I wait for someone to give the explanation for this work.

What do you think about the art community and market? 

If there is a reasonable person in this community, a god or a parent, he will tell us, don't shit in shit. We create the illusion within the illusion. It is the only place, however, where we can renew the value of art by practicing and theorizing our judgment. This is another way of connecting an individual opinion to the life of the masses, saying that there is value in the image.

And finally, what are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I am looking for a new expression, particularly through the development of analog film. Since the use of film itself is archaic now, we must look for the real reason why we do it. I believe that there is still a new aspect in cinema, like that no one has touched.
Either way, one day I'll make a film where the art school explodes into pieces. Some cry, but others are delighted.

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.