We were both strangers in Germany when we met.
We realized how differently we perceive “the Nature” as “a part of landscape“

Nature , landscape located in the urban landscape has become the main theme of our exploration, the topic that became our meetingpoint .

Exceptional in this project is the clash of two different cultures from which we come from, especially the issue of the perception of The Nature. In Japan, where Buddhism is strongly rooted, human being is perceived as a part of nature, and things that are “natural” are not automaticaly perceived as beautiful and positive. The emphasis is put on multitude of natural phenomena, including the humble existence in man. Nothing is pre-defined as “good”, “bad”, “ugly” or “beautiful”.

In European culture and tradition of the Christianity the human being is always at the center - right at the top of the pyramid of earthly creatures. The Nature is subordinate to him and is actually created for that purpose - to serve the human. That what was human was seen for centuries as a “beautiful” and “good”.

Despite the fact that we live in the era of the global village and have access to many visual sources, multitude of information and travelling became popular - this human-centered vision , stemming form the culture in which we grew up has still a huge impact on our individual perception.

Analysis of these differences of perception on such an important element that is the Nature is the main objective of our project . We are looking for our meetingpoint .

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We have been working with the “landscape’ in our individual practices, yet in not in the same sense. Although our works seem to have a different approach to “nature”, we got inspired by each other.

For this particular project we worked in a collaborative way- treating our conversations, our exchanges of ideas as a start, as a new approach for our respective artistic acts.

The aim of our project was to find something new in our respective practices , and at the same time remain ourselves.

We decided on some topics and worked on them separately – me in Gdansk, Nobuko in Bremen. It is interesting to see how our works, although sprung from a common conceptual ground, finally came out out very differently. We often shared an idea during the creation process and that exchange expands our horizons, perception and final form of each one’s artwork.

In this way, "Meetingpoint" is not exactly a typical collaborative event - it is better described as an exercise in understanding each others way of thinking, methods of working and getting mutually be inspired by the process.