“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.”

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 and caused by humans—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. — Makino Takashi

Join Makino for the Los Angeles and San Francisco premieres of his new 60-minute feature MEMENTO STELLA.

MEMENTO STELLA

Thursday, September 19, at 7 pm.

MOCA Grand Avenue

250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Like news reports of wartime Japan, films with stories or a precise structure throw images at an audience with their meanings already intact. Rather than making films with my own imposed structure, my method is to abandon structure altogether or, in other words, layer images that once embodied meaning on top of one another until they become unintelligible. I aim for the resulting composite “image” to be like a nameless animate being with a limitless capacity for meanings so that my films become triggers for an audience to venture into their own imagination. — Makino Takashi*

Thursday, September 26, at 7:30 pm.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts*

701 Mission Street, San Francisco.

Makino Takashi, Memento Stella (2018), DCP (4K video), color, 5.1 sound, 60 minutes, stills. Images courtesy and © the artist. Photograph of Makino Takashi courtesy and © Nippon Connection.