This exhibition offers a sensitive vision of Japan through a series of color portraits, landscapes, and black-and-white still lifes with the look of prints. Opening in two stages on Thursday, June 4: > Chapelle des Cordeliers | 5:30 p.m. > Le Château d’Eau | 6:30 p.m. Hakanai Sonzai means in Japanese, “I feel myself to be an ephemeral creature.” In this work, the artist seeks to describe the feeling of impermanence that permeates Japanese culture, in a society that has forged demanding collective rules in order to face the hostility of a nature that imposes its law. Continuing an anthropological photographic project begun in Cuba*, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac traveled to Japan in 2020, a country marked by the terrible Fukushima tsunami and where people reveal little about their emotions and their psychological and intimate anxieties. Extending an approach begun in 2016 as an immersive investigation, the artist set out to meet individuals seeking to express the uniqueness of a personal story through their participation in the photographic project: yakuzas, Fukushima survivors, hikikomori (people living cut off from the world and from others, often shut away and taking refuge in their rooms), or “evaporated” people who have chosen to disappear voluntarily… During this long journey, the photographer captures moments of life: the Japanese are at the heart of the drifts of the Anthropocene, a burning issue in our modern societies. Made with a view camera, a shooting method inherited from the earliest days of the medium’s invention, his portraits are the result of encounters during which, unlike the reporter’s fleeting gesture, men and women, teenagers and adults open up about their personal histories, their fragility, and their existential anxieties. Gently, we enter each of their lives; each has become a character expressing the flight of time, the difficulty of being in the world, and a certain melancholy. As a country where social pressure and the demand to keep up appearances strongly shape personal identity, but also a country where the random forces of nature, with its recurring land and sea earthquakes, are ever present, Japan has developed over the centuries the concept of mono no aware, a sensitivity to the ephemeral, an acute perception of the vanity and impermanence of things. The exhibition interweaves large-format portraits, all taken in natural settings and light, with black-and-white photographs inspired by the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e, the subtle art of ink and woodblock prints. Pierre-Elie de Pibrac’s images immerse us in the depth of Japanese culture and aesthetics, revealing, in negative space, the fragile beauty of the human condition. *Desmemoria series exhibited at the Chapelle des Cordeliers (Toulouse) from June 5 to July 5, 2026 Accessibility Prices €5 - €3 - Free Tickets Le Château d'Eau Getting there 1 Place Laganne 31300 31000 Toulouse Tel: 05 34 24 52 35 Our sites: See venue listing
Event from the official Toulouse Métropole agenda; dates: 2026-06-05, 2026-06-06, 2026-06-07; venue: Le Château d'Eau; address: 1 Place Laganne 31300 31000 Toulouse.
Source: Toulouse Métropole