Kengo Kuma’s architectural project for the Centro de Arte Moderna refers to the Japanese concept of engawa [縁側], a transitional space in Japanese traditional houses considered neither inside nor outside. While the engawa of the traditional house so crucial in the films of Yasujiro Ozu is often forgotten today, it has recently been deployed to evoke multiple relational spaces out of the domestic space.

Engawa can thus be seen as a metaphor of the ‘in-between’, a concept that found a powerful echo in the 1980s between Japan and the Western world through the notion of ma [間]. This ‘in-between' facilitated a common dialogue between multidisciplinary artistic movements in Japan from the post-war period, during which a multitude of parallel histories emerged questioning the fiction of the official history that had constructed Japanese identity.

Engawa could be the tangible place for generations of the Heisei era (1989-2018), marked by the bursting of the economic bubble and the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake (1995), an era that represented a pivotal point in Japanese society. Its social and political consequences affected memories, myths and the weaving between the intimate and the communal. In the words of Timothy Morton, whose ‘ecological thought’ offers a frank rapprochement of structuralism and Buddhism notions, it is a question of 'observing what is changing before our eyes, slowly and collectively and how to share it with the other.'* This ecological thought finds a particularly strong echo in Japan. The mesh, its infinite connections and infinitesimal differences, finds its source in intimate space, in the so-called dividuality of the individual that can be translated by the multiplicity of the being corresponding to each of the relations it enters into (human or non-human). In other words, it led to the confrontation with multiple worlds so aptly described by Keiichiro Hirano.** It is therefore no coincidence that Edouard Glissant's ‘Tout-Monde' (‘Whole-World’) has had such an impact in Japan over the past twenty years. Archipelagic thinking offers the possibility of breaking out of the island deadlock and reaffirming a deeply composite culture in permanent metamorphosis. It welcomes subjective experience, redefines the question of identity and borders. It embraces the feminine, the vulnerable, the fragility, and the uncertain, broadening our perception of the world. From this area of ecological and digital interconnectivity emerged artistic practices inspired by a return to cultural notions of animism and their inclusion in a booming technological society that served as a support for the new generation that emerged after the Fukushima disaster, questioning the tangibility of our life as human beings.

The Japanese Season at CAM will present these topics through Time-based Art exhibitions, site-specific projects, and commissioned works and events. In a deep collaborative process with the multicultural context in Lisbon and Portugal, the Season aims to enlighten how the inter-relations between perception and emotion create other realities, articulated with embedded social and political situations to suggest powerful transformations.

* Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010.

** Keiichiro Hirano, La dernière métamorphose. Paris: Philippe Picquier, 2007.

MA in Contemporary Art History, Emmanuelle de Montgazon works on open and transversal artistic approaches that unite different art forms, maintaining privileged links with Japan. Between 1997 and 2006 she was appointed cultural attaché at the French Embassy in Tokyo and New York. Since 2012 she has been Director of Ryoji Ikeda's Studio in Paris and Kyoto and Advisor to the Odawara Art Foundation, founded by artist Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Rita Fabiana has been curating exhibitions and projects since 2006. In her curatorial practices, she examined participatory, cross-disciplines and experimental projects and practices where process of institutional relationship, memory/history, storytelling, identities and subjectivities are central. She joined the CAM team in 2011 as a curator and collection manager (sculpture and installation). She was head of programming at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum between 2016 and 2021. She is currently head of CAM’s Live Arts. She has a MA degree in Art History (Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne) and a postgraduate degree in Curatorial Studies (FBAUL).