ANTOINE D'AGATA

Antoine D’Agata studied with Larry Clark and Nan Goldin and is affiliated with the Magnum photography agency. His work comprises of (documentary) photography, for the most part, but is always highly personal; instead of wanting to represent reality, his photos indicate how he himself is an integral part of it. Not infrequently his work shows the opposing worlds of sex, drugs and fallibility, in which the unconscious, risks, and luck, are essential elements of survival.
 
Aka Ana
2008, 60’, video, colour, Japanese spoken, French subtitles.
‘Aka Ana’ is Antoine d’Agata’s pornographic diary of Japanese nightlife. Subdivided into six chapters, his first full-length film is made up of 120 fragments that correspond to nights in Tokyo, Osaka, and other Japanese cities. Armed with a camera, d’Agata spent four months on the road, convinced that his adventures would only deliver some 30 seconds worth of film. The 120 sequences show women in obscurity: prostitutes, victims of violence, drug addicts, strippers. They speak about loneliness, sex, death, and life, as a black hole. ‘Aka Ana’ mixes different film formats, camera techniques and points-of-view (sometimes the artist worked with ‘invited’ directors) and the fragments correspond with an equal number of literary extracts. These function as the narrative, or the emotional backbone of the film. D’Agata doesn’t ply a homogenous style and doesn’t stay out of the picture; on the contrary, he features in all the sequences and is the one that binds ‘Aka Ana’ together. Dehydrated, deeply saturated in alcohol and on the verge of collapse, the photographer-filmmaker makes his way through the metropolis to look for another world – not in the least driven by his own fear of sexuality and death. ‘Aka Ana’ is a complex, problematic and provoking film that explores the boundaries between using and being used. Does d’Agata document in order to experience or experience in order to document?