Hakanai Sonzai, 2023

Hakanai Sonzai, 2023

Pierre-Elie de Pibrac

Between December 2019 and August 2020, Pierre-Élie de Pibrac embarks on a journey to Japan that will give life to two series, Hakanai Sonzai and Mono no Aware. While the use of color and the subjects chosen may at first seem to oppose each other, the two series should be read as mirrors of each other: Hakanai Sonzai means “I feel myself to be an ephemeral creature”, while the concept of Mono no Aware should be understood as the emotion that seizes us when faced with inanimate objects or transitory nature. It delicately underlines the fragility of things and their melancholy, attempting to capture their essence, it tends to show, through the specific, a collective aesthetic and ideology that is unique to Japan.

Hakanai Sonzai

Hakanai Sonzai is a series of staged moments of rupture and awakening, which nonetheless tell personal stories based on the accounts of the people photographed. With a respectful distance towards them, the figures with their absorbed expressions seem absent, representing “spectral” people, withdrawn into themselves or from themselves, and observing with an elusive yet lucid gaze the stripping away of their experiences as much as of their being.

These faces, seemingly impenetrable in every way, nonetheless contain the deepest feelings animating them – as if behind the disenchanted contemplation of the recreated situation, a moment of personal crisis, they were all looking beyond it, probing the very human condition in all its fragility, ephemerality and elusiveness, noting in discreet brutality the secret of a collective tragedy, that of being alive, that of knowing that it is only a fleeting moment.

These silent moments, frozen like an image in the mind, places from which the individual cannot escape, and reminders of a painful and unforgettable understanding of what life is all about, might they not find their transcendence in Pierre-Elie de Pibrac’s photographic enterprise? In the manner of Freud’s fort-da experience, the (re-)creation of these situations gives hope of the possibility of surpassing oneself through the reliving of memories, of the possibility of seizing them, of actively possessing them and, thus, of regaining possession of one’s very identity.