January 21 – February 5, 2016 🏡 Institut français (French Institute), Kyoto

Kyoto Survey 

Initiated in 2016 during a study stay at Kyoto University of the Arts, the Kyoto Survey series explores the complex relationships between nature and urbanity in the city of Kyoto. Inspired by the notion of “survey” developed by artist Ono Tadashi, it is based on a protocol of semi-controlled dérives—on foot and by bicycle—combined with a practice of participatory mapping.

The project highlights various situations of coexistence between vegetation and urban space: informal nature developing in interstices, popular gardening practices, or the intrusion of urban gestures into the heart of parks and forests. The collection of images oscillates between two poles: a quasi-geographical approach—objective and cartographic—and a more subjective one, marked by the emergence of unexpected scenes, almost like profane illuminations, and by a sculptural sensitivity to forms.

First presented at the Institut français du Japon – Kansai in 2017, the installation combined small photographic prints, freely displayed on a table covered with a blue tarp, with heteroclite objects (artificial turf, monster figurine, fake vegetation, etc.). This dispositif aimed to create an open experience without explanatory text, inviting visitors to interrogate the images and think collectively about the multiple regimes of the vegetal in the city: control, informality, poetry, and ornament.

Through this work, photography becomes a double of the way nature itself turns into image within the urban context: concrete and constructed forms, traces of the human imagination applied to the living.


A photographic series and exhibition by Thomas Vauthier