Forte dei Marmi – Italy
Photography exhibition
Summer 2022
The site used to be abandoned and the kingdom of cats … Today it is a very famous design concept store with beautiful gardens and terraces and indoors with different stagings. Cats will be back in the place with photographs of Neko Project!
In Japanese the word NEKO means CAT Yulia Riva and Sophie Cavaliero are pleased to present NEKO PROJECT, a photographic exhibition on the theme of cats in Italy in 2022. The famous novel by Natsume Sôseki, “I am a cat”, shows us the importance and the need to sometimes take a cat’s point of view on our world. Cats have always played an important role in Japanese culture, from Maneki-neko to Hello Kitty; from the book The cat, Shozo and the two women written by Junichirô Tanizaki to the cats of the Ghibli studio; from Chiro, the dying cat of photographer Nobuyoshi Araki to Sasuke, the lost and found cat of another photographer Masahisa Fukase. All the Japanese photographers of this exhibition have responded to an open call for the NEKO PROJECT project organized by Sophie Cavaliero and a jury composed of galleries, photographers and directors of festivals or photo agencies. Those photographers proposed a series of very personal photographs on the theme of the cat but with their own language, their own style, their own technique. The NEKO PROJECT project allowed the publication in 2018 of a book of photography with the 86 participants in the project and four exhibitions in France, Belgium and Holland. The NEKO PROJECT project is a moment of friendship and love between our culture, western and eastern, between humans and cats.
Which Japanese photographers will be presented at those exhibitions ?
BANRI, Atsumi Daisuke, NiNi Frisky, Jun Fujiyasu, Yuko Fukagawa, Kai Fusayoshi, Yuji Hamada, Toshiko Hashimoto, Mika Horie, Masanori Ikeda, Masakazu Ikeguchi, Dai Ito, Hiromi Kakimoto, Risa Kayahara, Tadahiro Kumagai, Masayuki Kurihara, Shigenori Miki, Yoshinori Mizutani,
Yasushi Mori, Nohagi Naka, Takehiko Nakafuji, Shoji Ogawa, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Kumi Oguro, Koji Ono, Tatsuya Ozawa, Naoyuki Ogino, Koji Onaka, Eric Pelletier, Patrick Rimond, Abiko Sachie, Satoru Suyama, Kuraya Takashi, Shinichi Yokozawa, Kenta Tsunori, Takahiro Yamashita,
Chiaki Yao, Masahisa Yokomizo.