In 2018, Axelle Lenaerts spent a few months in Tokyo, Japan, where she lived in a shared house with 11 young Japanese people. Since then, she has returned to Japan several times, and during these visits, she gathered recordings through various mediums such as texts, films, flowers, sounds, and drawings. She kept this material because she felt the need to remember the contexts and situations in which she lived. She created a list of all the things she did not want to forget. 

 

The work she created for the exhibition is the archive of these documented memories. Now that she lives in Antwerp, she is trying various ways to return to Japan so she can continue to exist at the intersection of both worlds.

 

The wooden memory boxes are composed on the floor in the form of a video editing timeline. They can change places, content and have the possibility to expand, so the archive can continue to grow over time. 

 

 

Text by Sébastien Pluot, curator of the exhibition “Wordlines” (2023)