TOKYO PALACE HOTEL, 2025
Photography, variable dimensions
Photography, variable dimensions
The story of this work began many years ago with the purchase of tourist guide I found in an antique shop in São Paulo, Brazil: a royal-blue hardcover booklet produced in 1961 for guests of the newly opened Palace Hotel in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The guide, entirely written in English, was probably made for a certain financial class of tourists — someone with sophisticated and secure tastes. Americans, whisky drinkers, European couples, or businessmen in fancy suits.
Tokyo is a territory that has been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries due to earthquakes, war, and rapid technological development. As a result, many places that appear historical are in fact reconstructions, replicas, or carefully maintained simulations of something that no longer exists. I approach this condition through photography, focusing on spaces where artificiality, simulation, and memory overlap.
More than sixty years later, I used this guide as a set of instructions during an artistic residency in Tokyo. Following the addresses listed in its pages, I visited and photographed the locations suggested to travelers of another era.
I walk through the city methodically, visiting the places mentioned in the guide. Like a good tourist, I visit and photograph each place only once, knowing I will never return. There is always a daily repetition of events: newlyweds posing for portraits in the Imperial Garden, the futuristic boats that sail along the Sumida River, the internal train line circles endlessly around the complex of resorts that surround Disney.
I remember the story about the Ship of Theseus, which is somehow called a “paradox” tale. Theseus is a ghost ship, sailing the ocean eternally. The journey is so long that, along the way, the ship’s parts are replaced by others, and others, and so on, until nothing of the original construction remains.
I think of the city of Tokyo as a Ship of Theseus — sailing through calm, ancient, prehistoric waters, close to electric fish and other creatures that inhabit the ocean’s abyss, its trenches, its deepest precipices. The ship is silver, built from the most robust and sophisticated wood. Even though all its parts have been endlessly replaced, countless times, it remains recognizable — in dreams and in the world of images.
