Eri Saito

4.25min, color, sound, 2016

Inspired by a text by legendary Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and the “scintillating scotoma” that precedes a migraine, Eri Saito’s Slightest Pretense is a wordless, Super 8 near-narrative that feels like a lost oddity that could have washed up on a shoreline.

This piece explores the unique dynamics and communication that arise from the inability to fully connect and understand each other. In our daily lives, we form various social circles through interactions with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and family. With the prevalence of social media and online platforms, people can create even more diverse social circles and connect with individuals from all over the world. Through this artwork, the faint boundaries that emerge from individual communications and relationships are contemplated, with the hope of sparking thoughts about our future existence and how we interact with others.

Countless stone statues of Buddha without their heads have overwhelmed visitors at Nihonji Temple in Nokogiriyama. Some of the statues have been installed with someone else's head in later years which action is called "Okubitsunagi". These statues are not only the religious idols but also a unique installation arts. There are various views of the reason why the statues had been cut off their heads. Some say it was because of movements of abolish Buddhism in the Meiji restoration. And others say it was because of the superstition that your wish would come true if you could find the statues similar to someone you like, cut its head off and hold a memorial service. What kind of feeling would be like when you cut off the statues’ heads which supposed to be the object of faith until yesterday?

This is a video work made of own home-video footages. When I see the recorded videos during my childhood, I feel a sense of alienation as if I was looking into the past of others. These videos cut our memories into pieces and pieces, are they recorded as fact, or memorized as the truth? Thinking about the gap between fragmented memories and actual records, the deconstructed images are arranged in a way that compensates for the negative sides that have not been recorded. Those blurred images and inarticulate voices might be seen as an expression of the discrepancy of my memories.

How do we perceive things accurately? How do we communicate what we are aware of and what we see and hear to others without fail? This video work depicts the process of confirming things through the movements of people in an improvisational performance.

It was not raining, but the ground was wet because the water was dripping from the outdoor units of the air conditioners on the towering buildings. The neon lights of Tsim Sha Tsui glittered in the mysteriously shaped puddle. The film is a diary-like film that captures peaceful Hong Kong in 2019, just before the pro-democracy protests against the Fugitive Slave Ordinance intensified.

When I heard the radio broadcast about a missing 15-year-old boy, I realized that I was dressing exactly the same as that boy according to the announcement. It gave me a mixed feeling that on the one hand, I was wondering why this young boy had gone missing while on the other hand, I felt that somehow I became the one that people were looking for because of the clothes. The weird anxiety that the absence of me might cover the real absence of the boy fulfilled me the whole time till I got back home, and the video of this work was taken within that time. The sounds were recorded from the original broadcast. ​

On April 7, 2020, the first state of emergency was declared in Japan. People disappeared from the streets and movie theaters and museums closed their doors. Whatever happens in the world around us, the existence of you and I remain unchanged. As long as we can recognize each other correctly, we should be able to maintain our sanity to some extent. It doesn't matter if someone is still asleep in the hospital, or if the neighbor's cat has gone to heaven. Memories live on vividly in our memories. Sometimes they can evolve into exaggerated images, but what is important to me will continue to evolve inside of me. It's the same even if they don't exist in this world. I think it's almost like a prayer. Surrendering myself to the world of images―what this world needs is imagination! Including all the love we have for our neighbors, strangers, and partners.

It's a background that I haven't specifically mentioned in this film and that no one can know, but last year a family member who had cancer had part of her body surgically removed. I created this film based on my experience of indirectly feeling that pain as a stranger. I think it was a psychological pain I felt from the painful appearance after her surgery, but for me it was an inexplicable sadness. Practically speaking, we cannot feel the pain of others, though if you physically connect the nerves in your brain to each other, you might be able to feel it. My simulated experience of this pain seemed to me as if some complex neural transmission was taking place which could not be interpreted. While watching the white objects in the film spin and fall, I hoped that time and wounds would melt away, and that someone's physical or emotional pain would heal.

There’s a spider secretly settles in my room. Sometimes it appears with its cutesy bearing and somehow, I can feel its building nests in my brain, obscuring things that I can’t or am unwilling to remember, where all the insane and violent thoughts are lurking. This 8-feet little thing only shows its face in unexpected moments silently but is still moving in this enclosed room, even today.

We are not conscious while sleeping so we don't know what our bodies are doing in the real world. It might be a brain bug that makes our body move unconsciously like sleepwalking. This is an experimental work for recognizing a conscious state.