Utaki

Ricardo Tokugawa is the produce of immigration: Sansei, of Okinawan descent, he carries the mixture of three cultures in his path: Brazil, Okinawa and Japan. Understanding the meaning of this position goes far beyond geographic and cultural issues, implies a personal confrontation, in his pursuit to understand himself in the world.

Utaki, in Okinawan, translates the idea of a holy place, place of prayer, usually spaces in nature: a forest, cave or mountain, accessed by few. This look at the sacred, in line with the need felt by the photographer, glances at his roots, in a process of investigation of family and home, concepts that are blended within Japanese culture.

The photographs posted on the butsudan, the Japanese shrine, mark the presence of the ancestors in the space of the household. The traces left in the form of 3x4 portraits remind us that the borders of the visible are constantly permeated by the invisible world of the deceased.

Ricardo recreates and confronts models, suggesting to us that tradition is something invented. Way further than this, his work challenges the very notion of tradition, highlighting the performative character of human existence, as the artist produces and updates his own rites of passage. In these gaps, the work’s internal tension is established: there are moments of displacement, presence and absence, encounter, estrangement and return. These discursive practices make the narrated experience more potent, breaking the walls of the house to therefore reach greater distances, other ways of inhabiting one’s own body and domestic spaces. He invites all members of his munchuu, those who dwell under the same roof, to take part in his private world, sharing and exchanging experiences. He becomes a stage director and, in the elaboration of his own and unique narrative, he dramatizes everyday life.

Utaki urges us to look, from the inside out, at our own identity issues, recognitions, and estrangements which, from within our particular traditions, places, rituals and habits, do not cease to move and refresh themselves. While (de)construction of experience, memory and family archive, the story told and the experience lived are no longer just personal memory, but a dynamic confrontation with one’s own alterities, always present. In this crossing, he makes himself an instrument and a reality for the other, a world practice.