Rei Hayama

Dormant Soil / Concrete Reflections is the answer to a poem by Kim Hyesoon entitled “Haeundae Texas Queen Kong”. Produced at the start of the pandemic, Zai and Rei explore the personal effects and thematic resonance of the poem as they travel around their neighborhood.

2021/video/16:9/sound/12 min

A video sketch at Hayama's bed, situated in Bangkok.

The essence of "The Pearl of Tailorbird" lies in the fortuitous poetry generated through the process of multiple translations – avian to human, phonetic to semantic, textual to visual – in which the latent porosity of language helps give birth to multi-layered resonances. For Hayama, this kind of whimsical linguistic deconstruction underscores the central role of language in the process of anthropocentric world-building – and offers a method for transforming hegemonic modes of knowing into ones perhaps more sensitively attuned to our own origins in the natural world. Coaxing a depth of associative meaning from the rhythmic interplay of sound, text, and imagery, The Pearl of Tailorbird perhaps most resembles lyric poetry – or a hermeneutic puzzle – given spatial form. (www.emptygallery.com)

The essence of "The Pearl of Tailorbird" lies in the fortuitous poetry generated through the process of multiple translations – avian to human, phonetic to semantic, textual to visual – in which the latent porosity of language helps give birth to multi-layered resonances. For Hayama, this kind of whimsical linguistic deconstruction underscores the central role of language in the process of anthropocentric world-building – and offers a method for transforming hegemonic modes of knowing into ones perhaps more sensitively attuned to our own origins in the natural world. Coaxing a depth of associative meaning from the rhythmic interplay of sound, text, and imagery, The Pearl of Tailorbird perhaps most resembles lyric poetry – or a hermeneutic puzzle – given spatial form. (www.emptygallery.com)

The essence of "The Pearl of Tailorbird" lies in the fortuitous poetry generated through the process of multiple translations – avian to human, phonetic to semantic, textual to visual – in which the latent porosity of language helps give birth to multi-layered resonances. For Hayama, this kind of whimsical linguistic deconstruction underscores the central role of language in the process of anthropocentric world-building – and offers a method for transforming hegemonic modes of knowing into ones perhaps more sensitively attuned to our own origins in the natural world. Coaxing a depth of associative meaning from the rhythmic interplay of sound, text, and imagery, The Pearl of Tailorbird perhaps most resembles lyric poetry – or a hermeneutic puzzle – given spatial form. (www.emptygallery.com)

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

The filmmaker talks about what she sees while she's staring at the projected image of a face of the caged Emu (bird), which is one of a filmmaker's own archive shot by herself at the zoo. In one moment, there's a drop of tear falls from the eye of emu. Even if this one drop of tear has been merely a physiological phenomena to removing dust from its eye, yet the tear touches human mind. The eye of Emu and the tear are not only to make us perceive a human figure in the reflection, but it shows something farther beyond.

While keep continuing the silent conversation with Goethe's "Theory of Colours", I went toward the nature of Slovakia, a landlocked country of east europe. Various living things, natural caves which hides the overwhelming space in its inside, and the sun. I turned the camera towards (so-called) the insignificant incident, and I paid close attention to those things that related to each other not by language but by the colours that human can not see.

Comparing the number of photoreceptor cells in eyes of human and hawk, hawk has about 8 times more photoreceptor cells than human. The title of the film is about human eyes. Figure of flying bird in sky as a small black dot is the intimation of things that human can not see. Human has been following the black dot by the desire to fly. On the other hand, bird has been distorted by human as an image or a sign.

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.

Rei Hayama collaborated with Takashi Makino's "Space Noise", and there this "Space Noise Calling" was made. Hayama introduced an old rotary phone to the performance, which is disconnected and the microphone is built-in. Whilst the bells of the disconnected phone is ringing, image of penguins which walking on the artificial ice at zoo, which is visible through the glass, appears and it mixed with Makino's original image of "Space Noise".

Artificial flowers and plants are kept changing its composition. An imitation of shapes of life, water drops, light from rechargeable hand light, endless accompaniment (climb every mountain.) The scenery reminds tiny grave or a small funeral for dead animals and other small creatures. However, this state of scenery gradually changes by the endless composition.

The film inspired by the landscape of Friesland, the north part of Netherlands. The flatness of horizon, the history of fought with water suggests us a sense of "Wall" between human and nature.

One day, one moment, there the forest has its own time. The place without meridian. The empty place. The place without human. The place has been thought as "forest" in our memory. This suspense film of forest was shot in the small forest which gets even smaller and forgotten in urban life in Japan. The graphical details, the dark, humid shadows of forest and the digital sound are overlapped.

Footsteps of horses and sheep. I run to the forest in a hurry. But I never reach to the forest of my destination. I'm remain in the original place, the place before the tale. After the destination (forest) disappears gradually, aimless footsteps are left on the stage. "Being on the way to somewhere" becomes a story of film in itself. The white light placed in the center of picture is continuously changing its role and prolongs the tail of the tale.

The story flowing under this film has certain parallels to the theory of bird's hibernation and transformation advocated by Aristotle which is already dated today. In the land, ash snow is falling. The land's flag is fluttering in the blowing wind. And the quail slowly transforms into some other species. When listening to the voice of soil, there is no border in the land.

A single take of a model of a Japanese home burning down, captured on hand-cranked 16mm film that was processed in coffee instead of traditional chemicals.

The expansiveness of empty landscapes that call attention to their subtle forms in a dynamic macro-perspective, and densely built urban ensembles combined with fragments of dry instructions and inconspicuously urgent communications to create a reserved fictional meditation on the relationship between man and machine.

Film THE FOCUS is constructed from rephotographed images collected from old pictorial books of volcano, nomad's culture, war , mountains, some texts and simple color screens that are inserted between images. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Earth’s Holocaust” is there as a background of this film.

Song written and produced by Sokif Vocals by Calu (Matryoshka)

The origin and the end of the world is portrayed by weaving fictitious landscapes of diorama set and the lighting effects into the actual landscapes of 2012 Tokyo. The film is like an old diary.

The film about human who visits a forest. Observing the existence of human who has to go back to their home, through the experience of the pretend game of being a bird.

Video, Color

16min, 2011, shooting format: 16mm film, screening format: HD, col

Takashi Makino’s source of inspiration, our place in the world and the universe, never seems to dry up in view of the never-ending flow of immersive films. Generator may well be the earthiest of his films so far, made as a reaction to the Fukushima disaster. A reality check, but in the world that Makino shows, this can never be achieved without looking inwards too.

The film was shot in a actual scenery left in the urban life. The leading character, one human (a girl), picks up a small package and opens it. She finds another package inside, so she opens it again. There is bigger package inside.... She opens it again and again and again. Soon, the package becomes bigger than human and this small human turns to drawing of a stone. Story is ritualistic throughout the film, and its soundtrack was made by Japanese onomatopoeia. There a cinema is insisted as an artificial thing of time and story.

The repeated sequence of "a girl appearing in the woods, burying dead insects and then leaving" is made without a camera. With each repetition, the film images are broken down and the color is fading. The girl is performed by the filmmaker herself, channeling media as a medium. This film is structural but also has a narrative.