Yudi Ahmad Tajudin travels solo for this particular research, opting to visit Kyoto at the time of Kyoto Experimental Theatre event. Within the logic of our research, the event is chosen for its international, cosmopolitan projection while being located in a city that is known for its massive accumulation of cultural and historical preservation.
The contrast, we assume, is perhaps one of the most interesting temporal friction, between the future and the past, between progress and history, between mobility and immobility. Can we detect anxiety lurking behind the friction? Even further, is the friction is the decisive moment to productively work against anxiety and fear?
On daily basis, Yudi corporeally shiftings between preservation-based places and experimental-projected spaces: visiting several shrines, Gion District, Honen-in Temple, or the “Swords of Kyoto” section of Kyoto National Museum during the day and experimental performance such as Marlene Freitas’s Bacchae and She She Pop’s 50 Grades of Shame in the night. Due to how the city constructs its places, the temporal friction between the past and presence is tightly distributed and territorialized, and citizen could not be conscious about the folding between the two sides of the city. We are conscious that, by reenacting a proper tactic of the drifter, Yudi could connect the friction as an embodied, experiential act, not by drawing but by becoming the map.