Highly pregnant and full of sorrow because of the death of her sister, a few months earlier, artist Anaïs López travels to Kyoto, Japan in the fall of 2016. She wants to get away from everything she knows, to a place where she can be alone and anonymous. During a walk along the Kamo river that runs through the city, she sees a turtle with a golden glow on her shield in the middle of the river. She takes a photo, but then the turtle dives under water and disappears.
“Strangely enough, I had the feeling that I already knew her,” says López, who sees the turtle once a few days later, on the last evening of the Obon festival, when the Japanese honor the spirits of their ancestors. “Someone told me the turtle the kami must have been from the Kamo river, a spirit that shows itself in the elements of nature; The wind, the water, the mountains, the animals. It is rarely that people see a kami, I was told – he would reveal himself to people who stop between the world of life and death. ”
Back in the Netherlands, after the birth of her daughter, López continues to dream of the turtle. In the following years she will travel seven times to Kyoto, always looking for the turtle, which, according to tradition, would have returned to the source of the river in the mountains. During her search in those mountains, she defies a bear, hefty rain showers and a monk that tells her that she is not allowed to continue.
That extensive quest is now depicted in the project The turtle and monka layered and personal story where it is not entirely clear what fact is and what fiction. It is full of fairytale elements, over the mourning for the loss of her sister, her search for the golden turtle she baptized Kami and the life lessons that López draws from them.
Disagree
Anaïs López (1981) made a name for The Migrant (2018), also such a magical-realistic story, about a Javanese songbird. The project, a mix of techniques such as photography, archive images, film and cartoon drawings, was nominated for a Golden Calf and won The Dutch Directors Guild Award and the Zilveren Camera Award for Storytelling.
For the also multimedia The turtle and monk – Photography, film, performance, book – López added drawings of the Japanese artist Niwa Yuta and used them a number of special printing techniques: gyotaku and ‘etching photopolymer’. López: “Gyotaku is an old Japanese technique with which you can rub a fish with ink, and then you make a print on laundry paper. It distorts, sometimes the shape of the animal is hardly recognizable. That makes such a print alienating. I was looking for a way to depict death. Simply a dead animal that I encountered along the way photographing, I only thought that was awful.
“Photopolymer etching is a photographic process to make an etching. I translated my photos of insects and beetles that I found during my search for Kami into etching with blue ink, giving the animals a surreal character. ”
The turtle and monk With its poetic images in mostly red and gold tones, invites you to go into the imagination, “says López. “It is an aesthetic project, in which I hope to seduce people to connect with the beauty in the world. In the beginning I went looking purposefully for Kami. I thought: if I do my best hard enough, I will get what I want. The monk I encountered said: “Gewish is the biggest problem of humanity. We have everything, but we don’t see it. We always want more. ” I was so obsessed with finding Kami that I did not see what was already around me.
When I walked through the forests of Japan, I really started to look. Every creature, every leaf, every ripple in the water had meaning. We are not separated from nature – we are part of it. I hope that by portraying nature so beautifully, people feel connected to everything around us again. ”
