The Weird & the Eerie — Noor Boiten

The Weird & the Eerie
(work in progress)
Collaborative project with Floor Snels

MIXED-MEDIA
2025 (ongoing)

Our research focused on Yōkai, Japanese folklore stories about monstrous creatures that question the relationship between humans and their environment, such as nature, the urban environment, or objects. Coming from a Dutch cultural background, we were intrigued to find the aliveness of Yōkai folklore storytelling in historical and contemporary Japanese daily life. These folklore tellings have everlasting influence on individuals’ relationality to their surroundings and challenge rationalism and dualist thinking. But they can also be tied to broader research concepts than just that of folklore storytelling. Amongst other things, Yōkai reflect on our relationship to nature and can be tied to ecocentrism and animalism, but also have strong ties with monster sciences and spatial liminality, aspects that are also found within queer and gender studies. We focused our research on discovering the areas and locations these Yōkai are typically found, and captured them on film and photo’s, some of which we are developing further into a poetic documentary film and installation to be exhibited at a later point in time.

During our stay in Kyoto, as part of the *** in Residence network, we collected personal stories about Yōkai, visited the Toei Kyoto Studio Park to witness the Parade of the 100 Yōkai festival, and researched the contemporary influence and meaning of Yōkai to discover how we can use them to understand contemporary notions of climate change and gender. Our research accumulated in a narrative story-sharing and -telling workshop, film and audio recordings, paper pulp sculptures and photographs. On the 13th of November, we temporarily situated these outcomes as an installation in Taikou-kyo, the 400-year old tea-masters house in the Western region of Kyoto we were allocated to work in during our stay in Japan. We experimented with projecting our video footage on the traditional sliding doors that were found in the house, and invited paper-pulp plant sculptures to invade the house through cracks in the traditional wooden floors.

This research project combines Floor Snels’ focus on ecofeminism and animism with my focus on (digital) liminality and gender. Using Yōkai folklore, we asked ourselves how we could recontextualize contemporary concepts of ecological crisis and gender from a lens that was new to us. On the 15th of November we presented our summarized findings during an intimite presentation at Bridge Studios in the Eastern part of Kyoto.

The final outcomes of the residency and research period will be presented later in 2026 in collaboration with the Van Gogh House in Zundert and the StadsGalerij in Breda.