Takaaki is a Japanese photographer based in Bogotá, Colombia, with studies in Art History and Cultural Anthropology, who has worked as a curator, teacher, and researcher. Likewise, he has carried out an interesting work of artistic exchange between Latin America and Asia.

He resumes his photographic work in 2018. In 2021 he presents an interesting project known as “Proyecto Nómadas” (“Project Nomads”), an experimental group that proposes new frontiers within contemporary photographic theory, from spontaneous situations generated around photographic shots as an intervention-action in public spaces.

Takaaki has developed his photographic work by dissolving the borders between art and ethnography; from there, through the eye of his camera, he moves through the urban cartography of some Latin American countries, such as Bogotá, for example, applying observation as a field researcher who becomes involved with what is happening around him, with the activities, actions and behaviors of some social and cultural groups that inhabit little-known spaces, for being outside the political interest or other social groups of this geography. Takaaki says that: “As a resident photographer and daily immersed in everyday spaces in Bogotá, my artworks seek to find a reasonable sense of visiting and experiencing the ‘anonymous’ spaces of the city (…)”.

Takaaki does not limit himself to registering places, to making documentary photography of those urban spaces and their people; he goes beyond mere registration; he creates, recreates, reinvents and resignifies the urban cartography of the anonymous sites of the city. In this way he conceives a visual discourse of social and aesthetic content.

In this series, “Cuerpos alternos” (“Alternate Bodies”), Takaaki declares that he investigates about some basic conditions of human bodily existence in relation to urban spaces in Latin America, which have historically been the focal point of various phenomena of conflict and violence.

José Gregorio Noroño