This work is part of ongoing visual research on Latin American migration in Japan and photomontage, aiming to understand the migratory footprints of Latin American communities within the Japanese landscape. In the Japanese city of Jōsō, 40% of the migrant population is Brazilian. This community is mainly located in Mitsukaido, home of the shopping district, where businesses and advertisements are directed to the Brazilian enclaves. Set in an urban-rural landscape, I am focusing on the community's migratory footprint and its effects on how we understand a landscape. By photographing signs, facades, and advertisements, a photo archive was created. With photo-walks, photomontages and remediation of these images, I started to create scale models, a middle ground between the observation of the city and the memory of it.

Being mindful of Flusserian ideas of migrants as mirrors and windows, Urano's studies on the representation of Latin American communities in Japanese media as theoretical background, and photomontage as a two and three-dimensional way of constructing; I search for a (re)construction and (re)observation of the city. As a Latin American artist, a researcher, and a migrant myself, I am attentive to the construction process of these models, and how they might be able to push the idea of what is an image as a middle ground between the two-dimensionality of the printed photograph and the three-dimensionality of the visited landscape.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Visual artist and researcher. Born and raised in Lima, Peru and based in Ibaraki, Japan. She is a Monbukagakusho Scholar of the Japanese Government. Currently pursuing doctoral studies in Photomedia at the Doctoral Program in Art at the University of Tsukuba. Her work has been presented in different cities in Latin America, Spain, France, the USA, Korea and Japan. She is researching landscape, migration, and Latin American communities in Japan. She is a member of the Time Lab/McLeod Lab research group.