Okinawa!!, Victoire Thierrée, Franklin Azzi Endowment Fund

The Franklin Azzi Endowment Fund is delighted to host the presentation of Okinawa!!, the first book by artist Victoire Thierrée, published by RVB Books.

Victoire Thierrée discovered the island of Okinawa through the work of photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu (1930-2012), the first to document the American military presence on the island, which he would present under the publication of Okinawa Okinawa Okinawa in 1969, during his first visit to Japan in 2012. In 2019, she explores this territory where thirty-two American military bases and some ten thousand GIs remain, and produces a series of black-and-white photographs, focusing on the outskirts of the bases, where omnipresent nature seems to offer a form of resistance to this occupation. This first series marked the beginning of a wider exploration. In 2023, she travels to the Smithsonian archives in Washington, D.C., to research botanist Egbert H. Walker (1899-1991), who directed a large-scale post-war project in the Ryūkyū Islands that mobilized American soldiers to collect natural specimens (plants, corals, minerals...) from the territories they occupied. In 1951, he oversaw the collection of over eight thousand plant samples from areas scarred by the violent fighting of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. From these archives, Victoire Thierrée selected forty herbarium plates, which she photographed in black and white. Okinawa!! brings together these two series of photographs.

The event is accompanied by an exchange between the artist and Pascal Beausse, curator and head of the photography collection at the Centre national des arts plastiques, organized with the support of the Albertine Alumni association.