What

the Momiji Project is a collaborative public art project "in fieri".

Collaborative, because it's not only me who will work on it. Also my friends and family have been invited to actively take part in it. Later on, depending on how the project will evolve and interact with the environment, an expanded public could be an active actor too. People are gonna affect the way the work will be, the way it will be shown and exhibited too.

Public, because it's not a project or an art work conceived and realized in the "void" of a white page in a sketchbook or of a white room of a studio (even though this image is kinda extreme). It's something that will emerge in the interaction with opportunities and restraints offered by the environment, let it be both physical and social-cultural.

In fieri, that is "being in a never ending process of change", because the freedom of the people involved, the changes of the weather and the light conditions during the day and across the next months and seasons will be active subjects of the project. Things can be planned in a way but these "plans" are just brief outlines on a map written in a language you don't know or anyway you are still trying to learn.

It's a project about connections and relationship across time and space.
it's a project about waiting and suspension of re-action
It's a project about contemplation

I asked my friend and my family to keep a leaf from their autumn and send it to me. I will do the same: keeping a autumnal leaf and send it to them.
Each leaf will mean time dedicated to wander about where one lives, look for the trees changing from a season to another, listening to the wind singing through the leaves thus getting aware of the (maybe habitual) environment around him or her. Each leaf it will mean time dedicated to a friend without immediate or anyway very fast feedback like in a chat or via email or phone call (looking for leaves, picking up one, putting in an envelope, going to the post office and sending it) and time dedicated to waiting for a reply or to thinking of a letter travelling across the world to reach a friend.
The exchange of leaves is a way of connecting places and times by using something slow like normal post and unpredictable like the colours of nature.

In the mean time I'll be working on something else "in situ", in a specific place and time of the day across the months I'll be here in Kyoto in order to create a site&time-specific work.
But I'll talk about it later....anyway it will involve taking a picture everyday in the same spot. That's why I'm looking for THE location. I love this part of an art work: researching and fantasizeing...a sort of daydreaming where everything is possible but still some attention is paid to the contraints of the environment. (we all bump against it...it's a kinda rite of passage I think)