TRAVELOGUE LECTURE ON JAPAN LECTURER MATEJ SITAR WAS BORN

Matej Sitar was born in 1980. After finishing the 1st Gymnasium in Maribor, he entered the Faculty of Social Sciences – Communicology in Ljubljana. In addition, he attended the Famul Stuart School of Applied Arts. He is now working as a freelancer in the field of photography.

Contents

In the lecture I will use a slideshow presentation to present my experience with the Land of the Rising Sun. I will concentrate on all the places I visited during my three week trip and explain in greater detail why I decided to visit Japan. Specifically, I will focus on Tokyo and Yokohama, Hiroshima and the Mia Jima island with the Floating Tori, Kyoto as well as a small hillside village with hot springs - Takaragawa Onsen.

Furthermore, I will present a photo project Tsuriai (Balance/Harmony), which I designed even before my departure to Japan and later successfully presented several times in solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad.

Tsuriai Series, which is a Japanese term for balance/harmony, was formed during a one month trip in Japan. I wanted to concentrate on two different aspects of this country, namely the classical and the modern, and present them as diptychs. The collection deals with the opposite poles of Japan, the experience of a Western visitor, and his impression of this country. Japan is a land of great contrasts. On the one hand, we immediately think of the classical and traditional Japan from the Meiji and Edo periods, on the other hand, we cannot ignore the splendor of modern cities, the latest technology and wild Japanese teenagers. This is modern Japan. In few other places in the world this duality is so obvious as in the Land of the Rising Sun.

In presenting the series, I concentrated not only on the conceptual and visual aspects, but also on its technical aspects. I tried to show the conflicts (differences) in a different way. Photographs portraying classical Japan were shot with a conventional SLR camera (single-lens reflex camera) and a slide film. They represent something that is slowly disappearing from the everyday use and will sooner or later completely vanish. Modern Japan is famous for its latest technological products, so I decided to use a digital SLR camera (single-lens reflex camera) for the presentation of this series.

The photos represent conflicting stories, but when you look at them all together, they create a balance - harmony. This harmony of contradictions is narrative and visual in the first plan and technical in the second.