Utaki, in Okinawa language, translates the idea of a holy place, place of prayer, usually spaces in nature: a forest, cave or mountain, accessed by few. This look at the sacred, in line with the need felt by the photographer, glances at his roots, in a process of investigation of family and home, concepts that are blended within Japanese and Okinawa culture. Ricardo recreates and confronts models, suggesting to us that tradition is something invented. Way further than this, his work challenges the very notion of tradition, highlighting the performative character of human existence, as the artist produces and updates his own rites of passage. In these gaps, the work’s internal tension is established: there are moments of displacement, presence and absence, encounter, estrangement and return. These discursive practices make the narrated experience more potent, breaking the walls of the house to therefore reach greater distances, other ways of inhabiting one’s own body and domestic spaces. Utaki urges us to look, from the inside out, at our own identity issues, recognitions, and estrangements which, from within our particular traditions, places, rituals and habits, do not cease to move and refresh themselves. While (de)construction of experience, memory and family archive, the story told and the experience lived are no longer just personal memory, but a dynamic confrontation with one’s own alterities, always present. In this crossing, he makes himself an instrument and a reality for the other, a world practice.

[ Text of Daniel Salum ]

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