The notion of the passageiro is central to the works presented by João Angelini during his residency at Koganecho Artist in Residence Program in Yokohama. To be a passenger is to inhabit a temporary condition: to cross places, cultures, and systems of meaning without ever fully belonging to them. Angelini embraces this position not merely as a traveler visiting Japan for the first time, but as an observer who moves through visual, historical, and symbolic landscapes shaped by displacement, memory, and exchange.
For Angelini, this first encounter with Japan unfolds through a complex temporal loop. Long before arriving physically in the country, Japan had already been present in his imagination. As a child growing up in Brazil, he encountered Japanese culture through the mediated worlds of manga, animation, and video games—visual systems that deeply shaped his perception of architecture, urban landscapes, and narrative space. These early cultural references, absorbed through mass media, formed a symbolic architecture that now reemerges in his work as he confronts the material and spatial realities of Japanese cities.
Architecture plays a crucial role in this process. Angelini observes the built environment of Yokohama with the attentive gaze of someone navigating between familiarity and estrangement. The city becomes a visual archive of forms, surfaces, and rhythms in strong dialogue with his childhood memories inhabited by this kind of architecture present specially in video games. In the exhibition, four paintings depicting building façades from Yokohama translate these encounters into layered compositions that oscillate between documentation and imagination. These works of the series Volutosas - SEGA are not literal representations; rather, they function as architectural fragments filtered through memory, perception, and cultural translation. The façades appear as silent witnesses to the flows of people—residents, visitors, workers, migrants—who pass through the city every day.
Angelini’s investigation also extends beyond Japan, linking the present experience of travel to the historical foundations of Brazil and his home town. In “A Linha do Desejo” (“The Line of Desire”), the artist combines fragments of rubble taken from the wall of a colonial house in Planaltina, dating back to around 1830. These remnants of colonial architecture—structures deeply entangled with Brazil’s history of exploitation and territorial expansion—are recomposed with patterns derived from a Buddhist temple in Kyoto visited by the artist. Through this gesture, Angelini creates a symbolic bridge between distant cultural systems. The colonial debris carries the weight of Brazil’s historical violence, while the temple patterns evoke spiritual geometry and contemplative order. The resulting structure becomes a hybrid object, in which destruction and reconstruction coexist. The work suggests that cultural forms themselves are passengers, migrating across time and geography, constantly reshaped through encounters and reinterpretations.
The idea of the passenger also unfolds in Angelini’s reflection on materials and global circulation. Works in the exhibition addresses the symbolic and economic implications of matcha, the finely ground green tea powder associated with the Japanese tea ceremony. In recent years, the global consumption of matcha has expanded dramatically, transforming a culturally embedded ritual element into a highly commodified product. This surge in demand has contributed to rising prices and agricultural shifts in which tea cultivation increasingly replaces rice production in some regions.
Angelini approaches this phenomenon through a delicate and ephemeral work: Chasen – depicting a chasen—the traditional bamboo whisk used to prepare matcha and an iconic symbol of tea culture. The image is created using the matcha powder itself. Over time, the material gradually oxidizes, loosens, and disperses, slowly dissolving the form of the chasen. The work becomes a temporal image: the plant that once symbolized harmony and ritual disappears through its own transformation into commodity. What remains is the trace of a process shaped by consumption and global circulation.
Another work, the animation “Laissez Faire No. 5”, addresses the ceremonial preparation of matcha through a painstaking process of drawing. Composed of 1,580 individual drawings, the animation translates the ritual gestures of the tea ceremony into a sequence that oscillates between reverence and critical observation. The title evokes the economic principle of laissez-faire, suggesting the tension between tradition and market forces that increasingly shape cultural practices. The slow accumulation of drawings mirrors the repetitive discipline inherent in ceremonial gestures while simultaneously reflecting on the labor embedded in artistic production.
Performance and photography also play a role in the exhibition being constant practice in the artistic activities of João Angelini. Here he introduces the figure of the “XetruáKyaku, a Tokusatsu Goiano,” a fictional character inspired by the aesthetic language of Japanese tokusatsu television series—popular superhero narratives known for their elaborate costumes and performative action scenes. The artist developed a costume and staged photographic scenes in different locations in Tokyo and Yokohama, inserting this hybrid figure into the urban landscape. The character functions simultaneously as homage, parody, and cultural translation, merging the heroic imagery of Japanese pop culture with references to the Brazilian state of Goiás, where the artist’s family history is rooted.
In these photographs, the XetruáKyaku appears as a traveler between worlds—an outsider navigating the city while embodying a mythology shaped by childhood imagination. The character emphasizes the playful yet critical dimension of Angelini’s practice, where popular culture becomes a lens through which broader cultural dynamics can be examined.
The exhibition also includes a contemplative video based on the Japanese expression 一期一会 (ichigo ichie), a phrase that can be translated as “one time, one meeting.” The concept refers to the idea that each encounter is unique and cannot be repeated. Angelini wrote the characters using a traditional Chinese calligraphy practice sheet that reveals the ink only temporarily when water is applied. As the water dries, the image slowly disappears. Filmed in slow motion, the video captures the gradual vanishing of the phrase. This work resonates with the artist’s own position as a temporary presence in Japan. Like the disappearing calligraphy, the experience of residency is transient: a moment of encounter that leaves traces but cannot be preserved in its original form. The slow dissolution of the characters becomes a poetic meditation on time, memory, and impermanence.
Throughout the exhibition, Angelini positions himself as a passenger moving between multiple cultural coordinates: Brazil and Japan, childhood imagination and lived experience, ritual and commodity, colonial memory and contemporary urban life. His works do not attempt to resolve these tensions. Instead, they expose the fragile connections that emerge when images, materials, and histories travel across borders. In this sense, “passageiro” is not only about movement through space but also about the circulation of symbols and narratives. The exhibition proposes that cultural identity itself is a form of passage—constructed through encounters, translations, and transformations.
Angelini’s first experience in Japan thus becomes more than a geographical journey. It is a process of recognizing how images that once belonged to fantasy and media have now become part of a tangible environment. Yet even in this direct encounter, the artist remains aware that he occupies the role of the passenger: a witness passing through a landscape where every meeting, every image, and every gesture exists only once.
