GAIJIN Japanese word meaning “foreigner”
« For a Swiss person, I’m Japanese and for a Japanese person, I’m Swiss or rather a gaijin. »
My name is David Takashi Favrod. I was born on the 2nd of July 1982 in Kobe, of a Japanese mother and a Swiss father. When I was 6 months old, my parents decided to come and live in Switzerland, more precisely in Vionnaz, a little village in lower Valais. As my father had to travel for his work a lot, I was mainly brought up by my mother who taught me her principles and her culture.
When I was 18, I asked for double nationality at the Japanese embassy, but they refused, because it is only given to Japanese women who wish to obtain their husband’s nationality.
It is from this feeling of rejection and also from a desire to prove that I am as Japanese as I am Swiss that this work was created.
“Gaijin” is a fictional recital, a tool for my quest for identity, where auto-portraits imply an intimate and solitary relationship that I have with myself. The mirror image is frozen in a figurative alter ego that serves as an anchor point.
The aim of this work is to create “my own Japan”, in Switzerland, from memories of my journeys when I was small, my mother’s stories, popular and traditional culture and my grandparents war recitals...
— David Favrod
In this series, Swiss-Japanese artist David Favrod elaborates in a very intriguing and playful way on archetypical Japanese images, ranging from aesthetic landscapes, to witty images of sumo wrestlers and geishas. Turning visual clichés into an intelligent and contemporary reflection on the complex relationship between the self, the other, image and memory. Favrod questions both the Japanese identity and his personal relationship towards this country that is both known and utterly alien to us.
— Marcel Feil (curator FOAM Museum Amsterdam)