Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Ido Dekkers
I was born in Cameroon,
I grew up in France
I have worked in Australia,
an today, my activity is based in Japan.
When I arrived in Japan 5 years ago,
I got no cultural shock.
I quickly mixed with the Japanese community,
I blend into the crowd and I look
at how people move
through very chaotic spaces,
how they greet one another,
how they tend to
doze off anywhere,
in a park, after a meal, at work,
how they ritualize their society,
and I feel fine there.
Ah, it feels good here!
So I think, at the end of the day,
Japanese people just behave like Africans!
(Laughter)
So you'll tell me,
"That's far-fetched! Black Africa, Japan, take it easy!
You don't look the same, you don't have the same physiology,
you don't dance the same way,
you don't even eat the same food,
you don't speak the same language,
what do you mean, then?
I would like to take you to a deeper level.
In Black Africa, like in Japan,
we are very animistic, which means
we believe that in that tree,
there's a spirit.
In that stone over there, there's a spirit.
There's spirit in the cell phone
you have in your pocket. Very animistic.
Besides that, these are
very tribal societies.
Indeed, in Japan,
you have the clan, the shogun, in Black Africa, you have
the village and the village chief.
You also have societies communicating
extremely well because they don't speak of themselves.
You also have societies extremely sophisticated.
That sophistication, it takes you
towards an infinite respect for the elders.
In Africa, we call them The Old Men, you know.
So, I think,
I am no sociologist, you know,
I'm no anthropologist either,
but I am a designer. My job is about
transforming our surroundings
to bring a new narration to them.
So when I come across a question like that one,
I have to do something,
I have to create something.
And I hope that creation will bring answers
to my questions in return.
Eventually, what I do,
I choose one of the most important icons
in Japan, the Kimono.
You show a kimono to a Canadian,
he will tell you, that's Japan.
You show it to someone in Australia,
they will tell you, that's Japan.
You show it to a Brazilian,
they will tell you, that's Japan.
The kimono is one of Japan's icons.
What is the kimono, really?
A kimono is a piece of material
13 metres long by 38 cm wide.
It means it goes from there, that wall here,
to that wall there.
It's that wide, that's all.
Nothing more, nothing less.
And it hasn't changed in a thousand years.
So I take this icon, the kimono,
and I think, I feel like working on it with something else.
So I choose African wax. You know what wax is,
it's the loincloth that African women
often wear around their hips.
I work, I design, I explore,
here's the result.
The Africain kimono.
(LAughter)
The African kimono, what does it define,
What sort of story does it tell?
It actually tells when you manage to take
from one culture and from another,
respecting the codes, the beauty
and the quality of those two cultures,
you manage to express a third esthetics,
another world, another openness.
So I'm going to ask Eliane to bring
one of theses kimonos I made in Japan.
And you're going to see what an African Kimono
actually looks like, here it is.
It basically lokks like that.
Here it is. So you recognize Africa,
you recognize Japan,
but all together it tells you something new.
These African kimonos, I made several,
in Japan, I made many,
and one of the most intense moments for me,
was when a Japanese customer
came to me and said:
"I have never worn a kimono, really,
but yours, I have no problem wearing them."
"Why is that?"
"Well, that's because in Japan, the kimono
is the image of beauty, it's the icon
of beauty, the kimono on a woman.
At the same time,
there's an echo of submission in it that I dislike."
And so, she refused to wear a kimono
since she was born..
And that was the first kimono she had ever worn.
She tells me," With your kimono,
I feel like I'm wearing a world heritage.
I really feel I am transcultural,
that I come from Japan
but I'm moving around the world that way."
THat made me very happy.
So my kimonos have been much appreciated in Japan,
and they still are.
But for one person who sent me an email one day:
"This is outrageous!"
Do not come and taint Japanese culture," --
The email was about ten lines long -- "you from the fourth world."
I thought, oh, wow!
Indeed, when you're getting on to culture,
codes, identity, you're getting on to
something very fragile, very delicate.
So the guy didn't disheartened me, on the contrary,
because I am a rather stubborn guy,
that's the way I am.
So he made me feel like carrying on and going even a little further,
and to go and play with another Japanses icon,
the tea ceremony.
The tea ceremony in Japan,
it's a moment when time, space,
the moment is put in total tension,
which puts you in perfect harmony with the others,
it has nothing to do with drinking tea,
it's just trying to enjoy perfect harmony.
So in Africa, we have a lot of ceremonies,
We have ceremonies for everything :
we danse, we sing, we cry, we laugh,
we have ceremonies all the time.
Everywhere, all day long, ceremonies.
And in Japan too, you have micro ceremonies:
you exchange business cards, a ceremony,
you get into a taxi with some friends, a ceremony,
you introduce your friend, well, ceremonies everywhere.
But with the tea ceremony,
I have tried to sprinkle on it a little bit
of where I come from
to try and see if something else would be told
with this tea ceremony.
And so, I thought,
I did a performance in Tokyo in 2009
in which we have a tea ceremony
in which people wearing African kimonos,
in front of 300 people,
that wasn't very intimate,
but we succeeded in creating some intimacy there.
You hear a kora player, playing the kora,
the Senegalese harp.
You also have a spirit in that tea ceremony,
a naked spirit wearing a Nigerian mask.
Here what it's like.
(Music)
At the end of this tea ceremony,
there is no controversy.
An very very old Japanese gentleman,
really very very old!
- like the old people you see in Asia,
They are ..
very old, bent and all -
He comes to me, like that,
he grabs me by the sleeve,
he pulls me down, I felt very small.
He pulls me down like that,
he looks at me in the eye ..
You know, old people,
when they hold you, sometimes,
when they hold you like that,
you feel like there are
150 years of history weighing on you ...
So he's holding me like that,
he's looking at me in the eye and tells me,
"Thank you for that moment of harmonie."
Translated in French.
He pulls a little more, he pulls me down,
he looks me in the eye:
in Japan, you never look people in the eye.
He looks me in the eye like that for at least 10 seconds.
That was long, and not even 10 seconds!
That was, that was ...
It reminded me of old men back home,
when you go and see an old man for advice,
it's the same thing indeed.
You go and see him, you ask him for advice,
he tells you two words, and you have to
sit there by his side for two hours.
(Laughter)
And you are supposed to know what he told you.
And quite often, we understand.
We understand even better than when they talk.
And what I understood,
was that this old man had told me,
"We are not so far apart."
So now, I'm going to tell you a story.
It's the story of two people who have never met.
Never, and who will probably never meet.
The first one is an African craftsman,
from Black Africa,
he's a sculptor, he works with wood,
he works with bone,
he works with what is inside.
The other works on wood differently,
he works with laquer, really.
So he cuts through wood, some other wood,
to collect the sap from this wood,
the blood of the wood, and with that blood,
he covers the texture of the objects
on which he's going to work.
So one takes care of the structure, of the flesh,
and the other takes care of the skin, of the texture.
I wanted to make this encounter happen,
so I went with my sister and my mother
in the Bamilaké country, in Cameroon,
and we went to get 4 little statues there
that we brought back to Japan -- statues
about that big,
about 43 cm high.
We have worked, I have worked
with one of the greatest Japanese laquer artist.
He works for the Japanese emperor, by the way.
We spent two and a half years on those pieces.
Two and a half years, that's a long time.
You have to be patient.
Two and a half years on the pieces,
we mixed the techniques,
ancient techniques that we use
in Japan, an that we were using a very long time ago
in Japan to apply laquer on objects.
So we used washi paper with living fibers,
we applied several layers of base,
we cleaned the wood first so that insects
would leave, we applied layers and layers and layers,
hundred of layers of laquer.
Here's the result:
blood brothers.
The blood brothers, from now on,
will live 800 years,
because of the techniques we have used.
800 years! These blood brothers,
they're objects that are looking at me.
They're looking at you, too.
And they're questionning us.
Do we really come from where we're from?
So I invite you today
to go to the stranger,
the strange one, the one who doesn't look like, you at first sight,
the odd one.
Go to him, he may be the one
sitting next to you today,
your neighbour, the one at the other en of the world,
and discuss, and above all, create.
Create. And through this creation,
discover the heart and the core of universality
we all have within ourselves.
Thank you.
(Applause)