Hiku

The performance HIKU is proposing a symbiosis with people who have withdrawn from society, people who have experienced hikikomori.  

French artists Anne-Sophie Turion and Éric Minh Cuong Castaing have long worked together to question the relationship between the body and community using experimental methods. As the 2020 Villa Kujoyama residents, the pair spent two years in Japan, conducting long-term research and creating work during the pandemic. They have created a performance together with several hikikomori (people who have become recluses and are unable to attend school or work), and the people connected to them, in collaboration with New Start Kansai association, a non-profit organization supporting such individuals. 

In HIKU, the performers, —people who have experienced severe social withdrawal and are in the process of resocializatoin and the members of their community—remotely control robots from their own bedrooms, appearing on stage through these avatars. The performance space is completely flat, with audience members seated on the ground, and videos of their past and present, activities and emotional landscapes, strangely but smoothly coexisting with these robots as surrogate beings for the performers. Eventually, through a dialogue mediated by a performer who also acts as an interpreter, the performers draw the audience into the center of their intimate world… 

The questions that the people affected by the hikikomori issues raise through their robot avatars—which include loneliness, detachment from reality, methods of resistance, and the fragility of our societies and minds—may perhaps offer us clues for new models of inclusive societies.