Tokyo Counter-Currents is a three-month photography campaign, beginning with the slowness of the Trans-Siberian railway and ending in the frenzy of Tokyo. Led by photographer Sylvie Bonnot, the project aims to capture the unique choreography of Japanese crowds in built urban spaces. Discover her work on our virtual gallery: Artistic Lab.
The mille-feuille landscape of Tokyo, its incessant flows, its immensity, its historicity, are characterized by blurred masses of people moving on foot, by train, in cars, etc. The objective of this photography campaign was to capture the trajectories of the people there and to bring out the lines of their movements alongside those of the urbanism, in the anonymity of these blurred masses. The project has being realized by Sylvie Bonnot, who was advised by Natacha Aveline, a CNRS researcher specializing in property studies in Southeast Asia.
The world of Tokyo and its rail network are places of exchange and transit, but also – and quite evidently – spaces of daily life. This Hensen comprises a vast area in the center of Tokyo and its periphery. The project will seek to highlight the similarities and differences that exist between the mobilities of the crowds in the center versus those in the periphery. The Hensen is the scene of multiple mass movements, in which one can capture:
Going against the frenzy of speed and intense movement of Tokyo’s crowds, Sylvie Bonnot approached her terrain through slowness, taking the Trans-Siberian and navigating her way to Tokyo. Because of the length of the journey, a whole world came to life onboard the Trans-Siberian.
Discover her virtual exhibition on Artistic Lab !
For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.
En savoir plus xMovement is the crossing of space by people, objects, capital, ideas and other information. It is either oriented, and therefore occurs between an origin and one or more destinations, or it is more akin to the idea of simply wandering, with no real origin or destination.
En savoir plus xTheories
To cite this publication :
Sylvie Bonnot (17 March 2014), « Counter-Currents– Tokyo », Préparer la transition mobilitaire. Consulté le 24 August 2024, URL: https://forumviesmobiles.org/en/project/2236/counter-currents-tokyo
Projects by Forum Vies Mobiles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 France License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at contact.
Other publications