Shashin-an, Izu




Shashin-an,National School of Photography, Arles

2022 - in progress
🏡  Shizuoka Prefecture

September 30 -  December 20, 2024
🏡 National School of Photography, Arles

Shashin-an

A collaborative process punctuated by events, Shashin-an is a research-creation project initiated by Fanny Terno and later joined by Thomas Vauthier within the framework of their doctoral studies, unfolding in a village on the Izu Peninsula.

Shashin-an embodies a hybridity between three dispositifs: the tea hut (chashitsu), the camera obscura, and the garden shed (koya). Drawing from the ideals of the tea hut, it seeks to cultivate specific attentional qualities across material dimensions (construction materials, tea utensils, and service offered by local residents), social dimensions (participants’ narratives), and environmental dimensions.

The camera obscura actualizes the foundations of photographic practice, transforming the marui mado into a lens that projects an inverted image of Mount Fuji across the wall, revisiting this archetypal symbol. Finally, Shashin-an merges with the garden shed in its outward appearance, its location—at the heart of a permaculture vegetable garden (shizen no hō)—and its function.

This three-tatami hut, built from locally representative materials (bamboo, wood, earth, rice straw) and know-how (such as tsuchikabe plastering), operates as an attempt at representing the environment, in a mesological perspective. The aim is to produce an image of the milieu (a “mesograph” or “mesogram”), through a technical dispositif (camera obscura), a materialist testimony (local materials and craftsmanship), and a documentary one (transcriptions of narratives).

A project by Disconoma (Fanny Terno & Thomas Vauthier)
Concept and direction: Fanny Terno
Participants: Yoann, Natsuki, Masumi, Masahito, Sachiko, Takumi, Yoshi