The Okama Paradox, a project by Clara Gassull and Israel Ariño – Exhibition opening and presentation of the artist book

“They say that right here where we are, there is the Okama crater, but if we can’t see it, how can we be sure it exists?”-  extract from Clara Gassull’s notebook.
 
The journey – the idea of mobility and displacement – has stimulated the work and life of numerous authors, acquiring a vital importance in the generation of new artistic proposals.

In 2019 we had the opportunity to travel to Japan for the first time, curious to discover a culture that was part of our imagination and that had become established in our memory through books and images. For four weeks the trip allowed us to accumulate experiences, to arrange different times, physical, metaphorical, imaginary, to compose them as a reflective territory.

In the resulting series, photography and drawing propose other ways of seeing, imagining, and feeling what we have in front of us. The drawing does it in a more abstract and synthetic way, with a subtle but forceful line. Photography, on the other hand, tries to anchor itself in a certain reality and reveal something beyond what its surface shows. Both disciplines try to share with the spectator temporal processes and experiences that are prolonged in poetic spaces, in more interior echoes. The result is a record of the lived experience, two intertwined stories, where each acts as an echo of the other.

Initiative financed with funds from the Lazio Region