Partners

Saitama Triennale is an international art festival held in the prefecture of Saitama. For the 2023 edition, we were in charge of curating and producing a project called the 'Portrait Project' which features portraits of Saitama City citizens. With the concept of how to deal with 'others', we asked Olya Oleinic, a photographer based in Paris and Amsterdam, in addition to Mark Peckmezian from Berlin, Germany to join the project. In Saitama City, which is known as a bed-town for people working in Tokyo, it is rare to see foreigners, and we wanted to see the interaction between these 'others' (photographers that don't look like Japanese at all) and local citizens.

"When I began thinking about the work I would create in Saitama, I started by asking myself: what defines the people of Saitama? In other words, what are their lives like? Who are their local heroes, and what do they take pride in?" This is an excerpt from the reply Olya sent us.

What’s more interesting is how we search for 'citizens'. Olya suggested following the concept of 'six degrees of separation'—the idea that anyone, whether it’s a president or a Hollywood celebrity, can be connected to anyone else through a chain of no more than six introductions.

Through this chain of connections, I wondered: who would Olya end up speaking with on the final day of the shoot? Where would she be holding her camera? What kind of portraits would she be taking? Rather than focusing on a specific community, what kind of picture of Saitama City will take shape from the individuals captured through this seemingly random approach to photography? It was impossible to imagine how it would turn out before the process began.