pompom

pompom is a project which starts and takes place in Tokyo Arts and Space –residency from September to November 2017. The work brings together Kellokumpu’s choreographic practice, Roumagnac’s visual staging, and Yazawa’s practice as manga-artist. The collaborative project is based on the questions of Kellokumpu’s current artistic practice, and his doctoral artistic research project’s questions on: Choreography as reading practice. The process of pompom examines the choreographic embodiment of the relations between movement, place, and material surrounding in the frameworks of hyper-mobile Tokyo. The project filters experiential movements of Tokyo by compounding western site-specific and context responsive choreographic practice with contemporary science-fiction and Japanese manga. The starting points for the project lies in the questions such as: How, as a temporary guest, to embody contemporary Tokyo through the lense of movement? How does Tokyo and its moving spaces, mobility systems, and transforming materiality shapeshift the choreographer’s body? How does these movements produce Tokyo? What kind of choreographic art is produced by inhabiting, and translating these intermassive movements with Japanese manga? What kind of critical and material encounters, parallel interests, translations, transpositions, paradoxes, and tensions are emerging when intimate western practice meets the megalopolis of Tokyo, through a dialogue with Japanese manga?

The working group produced a large-scale installation, which consists of five Tokyo-responsive videos, live-performance and 25 manga prints (panels + mangabook), which expose the queer manga character pompom.

Projektia ovat tukeneet Suomen Kulttuurirahasto, Taiteen Edistämiskeskus, Helsinki International Artist Programme HIAP ja Tokyo Arts and Space residenssi, TOKAS. The project is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Tokyo Arts and Space residency TOKAS, and Helsinki International Artist Programme HIAP.