With eyes closed, what appears is not darkness, it is colour in motion: shifting fields dissolving into one another without edge or origin.
In his photographic work, Barnabé Fillion traces this same territory. Each image operates as a constellation: a field where colour, light, and form converge. To look is to hear. To see is to touch. To listen is to see.
Synaesthesia as condition; the senses meeting where their divisions no longer hold. There, makyō appears: briefly, without explanation. Neither image nor memory, but flares of emptiness. A constellation that forms and dissolves, leaving only the trace of having been perceived.
Makyō: residues of perception that rise and dissolve at the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, or in the early stages of meditation. Not visions. Not dreams. Something anterior to both.
In Zen, makyō are uninvited presences that arise during meditation: colours, shapes, forms that appear without cause and dissolve without trace.
Fillion’s work belongs to that order: unstable, drifting, not yet fully formed. Traces of a perceptual state that cannot be held, only witnessed.
Flares of Emptiness: photographs taken at night by Barnabé Fillion - the creative mind of Arpa - form a personal journal of records of what appears when we close our eyes or when the night falls.
They do not document a scene. They register the emergence of form as attention drifts: absorbing light, movement, and duration without stabilizing them into fixed images.
Each one is a condition, not a subject: a vanishing configuration of light and motion that exists only within a suspended moment of looking.
With this photographic work, Barnabé Fillion draws a reflection on the relation between images and Zen meditation, leading to the concept of makyō - giving form to an extensive collection of images: what he calls “Flares of Emptiness”.
The Logic of What Disappears
To record is an act whereby human beings, confronted with what is disappearing, attempt to preserve it. And the very act of trying to record something from the past simultaneously calls to mind all that was not preserved – all that disappeared without leaving a trace.
In Archive Fever (1995), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) argued that the archive is simultaneously a place of preservation and a violent apparatus of selection – one that determines what will be forgotten. To archive is to acknowledge what has already been lost; it is nothing other than leaving behind the “ashes” of memory, not memory itself.
This is why the exhibition takes “the disappearing” as its central theme. VACIO Senko no Ku is a spatial domain – both within and beyond the human – for turning one’s gaze toward what has been lost. What the exhibition aims for is to re-examine, through synaesthesia and at the boundary between the material and the immaterial, memories that were never made visible, knowledge that was not absorbed into any institution, and sensations that have vanished. Here, “disappearance” is understood as inseparable from – the other side of – “memory.”
VACIO – Disappearance, Archive of an Erased Memory
“VACIO” is a spatial domain in which Arpa’s attempt to evoke memory through invisible media – scent – intersects with T.T’s vision of garments as “vessels of time” that raise traces of memory into the present, and where these two practices converge with the history of Ryosokuin.
Arpa’s founder, Barnabé Fillion, conceives of this spatial domain as a sensory field where layers of experience leave their traces, forming an “archive of erased memories.”
Even as matter appears to be fading, it does not wholly disappear: it continues to be archived in space in invisible form. And through certain perceptual triggers – such as the incense in this exhibition – those memories re-emerge with vivid clarity.
“Senko no Ku”, the subtitle of this exhibition and also the title of the incense and fragrance released concurrently, refers to a state of fluctuation produced by the act of reflection, and appreciated through the distinct scent created for each module.
Inspired by the generation and extinction of stars, the silver-like material employed here does not form a fixed image. Rather, through reflection, wavelengths of light, spectral waves, and phases interfere with one another in complex ways, bringing a continuous instability to the surface. There is no narrative to be told, nor any accumulation of meaning to be found there.
Just as a polished mirror retains no trace, the material may discolor, darken, or even visually recede from view. In this sense, existence itself may be nothing more than an event in which light appears momentarily upon a surface – emerging, and then vanishing.
VACIO Senko no Ku, an editorial object embodying the concept of the exhibition. It takes the form of a fold inspired by the ritual of kōdō, the Japanese art of listening to incense, its silver face marking the opening of the ritual. A second envelope contains silver scented flares, transforming the act of smelling into a gesture, a ceremony in itself. A booklet gathering the concept and imagery of the exhibition completes the object, forming together an archive of the ritual.
When scent and garment open doors to memory, the world once again appears with a depth that cannot be grasped by visible images alone. Through VACIO Senko no Ku, Arpa × T.T × Ryosokuin seek to generate a presence of absence in a spatial domain where fragments of countless elements – scent, image, garment, light – intersect. This is an attempt to question how Nature and the World, are perceived, and to offer a new perspective on memory.
Within the exhibition VACIO, the five sculptural installations become a spatial interpretation of Kōdō: a place where scent is attended to form a continuous field of subtle transformation.
The installations are made from aluminium: a material chosen for its high reflectivity. Its surfaces capture fragments of light and movement, amplifying the conditions of the space, holding them momentarily before they disperse. The room becomes a field of shifting reflections, where the boundaries between object, light, and environment continuously dissolve.
A photographic layer, integrated into the Kōdō structure, extends this logic, images woven into three-dimensional form, each one a transient configuration of light and duration.
Within the practice of Barnabé Fillion, Kōdō - the practice of listening to senses - functions as a central framework. Natural olfactory materials are not treated as illustrative elements, but as a language: one that structures perception, memory, and spatial experience.
Creative Direction: Barnabe Fillion
Collaborators: ARPA, T.T
Spatial Design: Ubsnant Ltd. (Arata Suzuki, Asuka Hoshi)
Texts: Kumiko Idaka
Images: Barnabé Fillion
Production: Seiya Nakamura 2.24 Inc.
Special thanks to: Ryosokuin Temple
A photographic layer is integrated into the Kōdō structure.
This series of photographies has been developed by Barnabé Fillion, all shot at dawn, when the light is almost gone. They do not document a scene in a conventional sense. Rather, they register the emergence of form as the eye disengages from fixed focus. The extended opening of the shutter functioning as a parallel to a closed eye that remains perceptive, absorbing movement, light, and duration without stabilising them.
The historical setting of the zen temple Ryosokuin induced a reflection on the relation between images and zen meditation, which led to the concept of makyo: residues of perception, traces that rise and dissolve at the threshold between the early states of the mind, in meditation.
The images in the exhibition aim to resemble these first internal figures that appear when eyes close, vision turns inward: unstable, drifting.
The photographic process does not capture objects, but conditions: vanishing configurations of light and motion, existing only within a stretched temporal frame.
Creative Direction: Barnabe Fillion
Collaborators: ARPA, T.T
Spatial Design: Ubsnant Ltd. (Arata Suzuki, Asuka Hoshi)
Texts: Kumiko Idaka
Images: Barnabé Fillion
Production: Seiya Nakamura 2.24 Inc.
Special thanks to: Ryosokuin Temple
Photography: DAISUKE SHIMA
The research into Kōdō - the Japanese practice of listening to scent, a centuries-old discipline of silence, attention, and the contemplation of fragrance - unfolds as a spatial system within the exhibition VACIO Senko no Ku.
A long study of this practice draws the basis of Barnabé Fillion’s work. For VACIO Barnabé developed a series of scents tracing them throughout modular sculpture installations.
Made in aluminum, acrylic, and fabric; these sculptures draw their logic from chapters of the Genji-kō incense game, each conceived to evoke one of the senses and their synchronised convergence.
The symbols of the Genji-kō, an olfactory alphabet, are translated into tangible shapes. Each module is constructed in a reflective material, capturing its surroundings and the elements beside it. Together, the pieces mirror the distorted image of the garden that surrounds Ryosokuin zen temple, the backdrop of the exhibition.
Every unit carries a distinct olfactory composition, while its surface produces a secondary layer of interaction: an exchange between scent, form, and environment, where perception shifts across registers in a whisper form of synaesthesia.
Within this structure, the invisible curves of scent are not treated as a residue but as a moving line, an invisible trajectory that continuously redraws the space. These curves emerge, dissolve, and reappear through reflection, fragmenting across surfaces and extending beyond their physical source.
In VACIO (emptiness), Kōdō becomes structure of reflection, and converging perception.
Creative Direction: Barnabe Fillion
Collaborators: ARPA, T.T
Spatial Design: Ubsnant Ltd. (Arata Suzuki, Asuka Hoshi)
Texts: Kumiko Idaka
Images: Barnabé Fillion
Production: Seiya Nakamura 2.24 Inc.
Special thanks to: Ryosokuin Temple
