フェアが、できていくまで

When I was shown the tokonoma alcove in Yukoryo, the detached building at our venue, I remembered Thomas Vauthier's performance Monomi. The performance "Monomi," which he gave at Nuit Blanche Kyoto in 2024, drew me into the world of tea.

More than tea itself, it was the moment my own culture was cut out by his hand, and light fell on things that until then had simply passed in front of my eyes. The tokonoma was one of them.

After that I began to experience several of his works and tea gatherings. Performance art was a strange thing to me. That a performance held for only a few people, over a few dozen minutes, should take place not in a large hall or on a stage but in a small space made in the likeness of a tea room. That such preparation, such spirit, should be poured into it. Why go out of your way to do it in this form? At the time I had only just let go of my business career and begun working as an artist, and it puzzled me.

In starting this fair, I asked Thomas if he would use the place freely.

Something that will not stay there, the way a painting or a book stays. The fleeting thing that appears between performance art and a tea gathering — something only for these two days, just as the same season never comes twice. A tea gathering I do not know yet, prepared by a host I do not know yet.

Please, let yourself fall under the spell of the world he makes.

A committee member, Shibakawa, runs an independent bookshop called AprilBooks, a few minutes on foot from JR Tsuge Station. One day I stopped by for a meeting about the book fair, and someone who had drawn for GARO was there. I was born after the era of GARO, and even so the magazine had become familiar to me, at Kogera Bunko in the same town of Tsuge. He gave a comic book to Shibakawa and me as a present. I opened it and a rainbow world spread out, the kind that widens your pupils. I had almost no familiarity with manga or comics, but I liked it very much, and I learned it was from the comics series of kuš!, a publisher in Latvia. When I told him I wanted to contact the publisher, he gave me their details right away. I wrote that I really wanted to bring this book to the people of Iga, and they said they would send some copies here.

I remembered Riga, Latvia, where I got off in transit in 2017 on the way from Estonia to Germany. It was only a few hours, but the sky was clear and the scene is burned into me. I know nothing about Latvia, and still those few hours in transit leave me feeling close to it. Through knowing a publisher from Latvia at this book fair, I hope that someday, like me, someone hears the word Latvia and remembers a world that struck them.

Before the municipal mergers of the Heisei era, each town and village around here was making its own culture. People may have thought the culture was the ninja, Bashō, Iga ware. I think the seeds were in the present tense.

The mergers seem to have cut some of those shoots. The international exchange that really did exist — a sister-school program with Worcester in England, among others — vanished as if it had never happened. New things were surely born in its place. Still, the further you go from the center of town, the fewer municipal functions remain, and the places where culture can start disappear one by one.

Could a seed that connects this place to the world be planted here once more?

I ask because it was seeds like those, small and many, that led to a life moving back and forth between this town and elsewhere.

While I was planting small seeds, with hope, a photographer in Oslo wrote to me: unable to come to the fair, but wanting to send books for us to carry.

It's the first parcel I've ever received from Norway. The address handwritten in Norwegian, the stamps — they thrilled me.

I doubt many people coming to the fair will hold a book made in Norway more than a few times in their lives. What will they feel when they do? I'm looking forward to it.

I'm Lily, director of Waza Waza. I live and work in Iga as an artist — though long before I ever called myself one, what I've always done is make things from zero to one. Somewhere along the way, beyond making work, solo shows and exhibitions, that practice grew into making places, and letting them unfold.

In 2022, Sukodo hosted the centennial exhibition of Motonaga Sadamasa, beloved for the picture book "Mokera Mokera." I had just returned from three months in Paris, having let go of a long career.

I walked through the hall feeling the floorboards creak underfoot, taking in the work, sometimes sitting down on the tatami. Watching wind and light drift through the space between Motonaga's paintings, I began to think: I want to make something here. That was long before I attempted my first solo show.