Device

Educational Project

April 2021
🏡 École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles

September 2021 – April 2022
🏡 ENSP Arles + Kyoto University of the Arts

Hyper-local rooms

Hyper-local rooms is a participatory artistic research project that unfolds through the creation of two mirrored devices interconnecting two localities: southern France (Arles, Marseille) and Japan (Onomichi, Kyoto). These devices function as spaces for creation, exhibition, and habitation, within a collaborative and pedagogical framework (in connection with ENSP Arles, Aix-Marseille University, and Kyoto University of the Arts). Bringing these spaces into relation aimed to foster a transcultural reflection on the different ways of inhabiting the world.

This project is part of Le Foyer, an experimental center for art and research in Onomichi (Hiroshima prefecture), developed by artists-researchers Fanny Terno and Thomas Vauthier as part of their research-creation doctorate. It takes place within four akiya (vacant houses), emblematic of the demographic and economic shifts in post-bubble Japan. Onomichi, as a key site of urban revitalization (toshi saisei), becomes a testing ground to engage with these issues, mobilizing artistic practice to explore their revitalizing potential—cultural, social, symbolic, and economic.

The guiding principle of the device was to build two interlinked installations, connected through telepresence, each acting as a tool to make, exhibit, and inhabit. In Onomichi, the experiment unfolded in a 4.5-tatami room, archetypal of Japanese domestic space. Interventions took shape in the interstices between tatami mats, where rails were installed to accommodate sliding modules—camera, microphone, screens, shelves, fusuma, mirrors.

The Arles version was designed as a more itinerant, ex situ installation. Built as a wooden 1:1 replica of the Onomichi room, it emphasized modularity: pivoting wall panels, double rails running across the ceiling, and an open skeletal frame supporting the functions of exhibition and inhabitation.



The participatory and pedagogical dimension unfolded between 2021 and 2023 through seminars, workshops, and exhibitions in France and Japan (ENSP Arles, Marseille’s Turbulences, Kyotographie festival in Kyoto). Students and participants were invited to intervene at multiple levels—design, fabrication, experimentation, exhibition—thus blurring the boundaries between provenance, production, and display.


A project by Fanny Terno, Thomas Vauthier, and Corentin Laplanche-Tsutsui.

With the participation of ENSP Arles and Kyoto University of the Arts.