Kyojima,

capital’s island,

today’s island,

friendly murmurs under the

half-open genkan,

in the shade we talk,

the rain, the fine weather, houses

that lengthen, that stretch,

the hymn of the shotengai,

the skytree-chan that watches

over, her belly full of fireflies,

the alleys that snake and the

gutter cats,

corrugated roofs, the fire spreads,

stopped by the houses, not of

straw but of stone,

the newborn sprouts embrace the

concrete, the asphalt, the earth,

pierced,

and in the semi-public pots

exhibited in front of houses, it is

growing wild and nice,

in the future atlantis,

Here what we do is

proto-archeology,

contemporalogy,

still alive

This exhibition is rooted in the documentary practice of the duo Disconoma, composed of Fanny Terno and Thomas Vauthier. Together, they have been exploring city landscapes since 2016, with a particular interest in Japanese cities and the dynamics of revitalization that are unfolding there. Since 2019, they have been focusing on the city of Onomichi (Hiroshima-ken), after a period of volunteering with the Akiya Saisei Project association, in charge of renovating vacant houses. In 2022, they discovered a distant cousin of Onomichi in Tokyo, the district of Kyojima (Sumida-ku), where Thomas has been living since July. It shares with Onomichi some surprising similarities: The bubbling of contrary and paradoxical forces - where the old hybridizes with the most contemporary, where the pressure to zoning clashes with the resistance of informality, the risk of catastrophe with the serenity of life, the vestiges of old time with the horizon of disappearance.

Fanny and Thomas sought to grasp these different energies at work and to make them felt. By producing a sort of documentary, but of a somewhat peculiar kind. For once, no human figure. Not even architecture, strictly speaking. But plants. Arrangements. DIY. Animals. Shapes. Textures. The human is there but elsewhere, in the background.

The human is also in their glances, in their artistic gestures, in these various degrees of agency, of representations. The ballad, the wandering, and the gathering are at the origin of this herbarium of materials : sensations, photographs, found objects. With a particular attention for the spaces in between, both private and public - the front of houses. Spaces of coexistence, of negotiation. Where plant pots (鉢植え, hachiue) are arranged, but also where more informal forms of life also seek to make their nests, in the interstices. Plants, described as "invasive", spontaneous and wild. Mini-altars of greenery are created, arranged with makeshift materials, in the middle of discarded objects. That are like urban sculptures, waiting to be seen at their true value, found sculptures. This is also where birds land, where bees forage, where cats hang out and where Kyojima's turtles spend time.

These spaces of creativity abound and are particularly vivid in Kyojima. Fanny and Thomas propose the fruit of their gathering, starting from factual representations (photographic) while exploring different modes and degrees of mimesis - from installation to sculpture and painting, while also inscribing their practice in resonance with UNTITLED space's character, through in situ interventions. Like so many attempts to touch, draw out the essence and share these forms of Kyojima vernacular beauty.