Takashi Makino's Memento Stella

About This Screening

Cinema Project brings Makino to Portland for his fourth visit, this time presenting his first feature.  Makino's unique working process usually involves capturing representational footage of humans, nature, and urban life in various formats and then transforming these images radically during the editing stage. Through a process of layering, superimposition and other formal manipulations, these concrete images blend together into pulsating visual fields of organic abstraction in his finished works.

"Memento Stella is a original phrase I coined to remind me to 'remember the stars' and 'never forget that we too reside among the stars', as well as the title of a project I started from winter of 2016.
For several years I've travelled the world, screening my work. And throughout this dark, sad world, amid war and terrorism, countless lives lost to natural cataclysms caused by human-caused, and there hasn't been a single day that death hasn't been in my thoughts.
At the same time, I do realize that it is not only death that binds us. We are also born and raised and living on this little planet, among the stars. I pursue my work with the idea that if each day, we might be conscious of this truth for even a moment, then maybe perhaps somewhere deep in our hearts, we might find shared artistic expressions, keys to a place beyond the religions, politics, borders, languages, and personal desires which tear us apart.
-December 2017 Takashi Makino-

This program is supported in part by The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles.