Thus far, you have worked at Towada Art Center and YCAM, which are regional art museums. Why did you want to participate in the JUMP program?

Mitome: I was told about the existence of this program right after I started working at YCAM. At the time, the first thing that occurred to me was that this could be good for YCAM. YCAM operates a variety of programs, and the budget available for visual arts is limited. Because of this, it’s difficult for the organization to put on exhibitions in collaboration with overseas art museums or to exhibit works overseas and stay within its exhibition budget. The JUMP program appealed to me not only because it would allow me to work on a project with a partner overseas, but also because YCAM would gain from that experience as well.
The opportunity to nurture emerging artists is also appealing. Japanese museums are smaller than museums in other countries, and once you get used to that smaller scale it becomes difficult to fill in the large spaces in foreign museums. I thought it would be a great opportunity to use the environment of a foreign museum to nurture young and mid-career artists. It’s a wonderful opportunity to introduce young artists working in Japan to an overseas audience.

So this will be good for not only you as an individual curator, but also for the art center (YCAM), and it will also help nurture young artists.

Mitome: Yes. I’ve always been interested in the kind of role that an art center can play in the community. I was attracted to Lisbon over the other candidate locations of Los Angeles and Sydney because the size of Lisbon (population roughly 540,000) suggested that we would be able to find common elements with running an art center in Yamaguchi City. I thought that it would be a useful reference for YCAM activities going forward.

Among the things you’ve done so far, I’ve been impressed by the things you’ve done alongside the community. In your previous position at the Towada Art Center, you organized Learning Program: Study at the Museum! in 2016 and Our Little Museum: A Student Exhibition at Shoyo Elementary School in 2017. How did you become interested in community engagement?

Mitome: When I was in junior high school I helped when the late Doctor Nakamura Tetsu—director of the Peshawar-Kai and involved in medical and agricultural aid projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan—came to give a lecture. That was a formative experience for me. As a doctor, Nakamura at first treated people who couldn’t receive adequate medical care in Afghanistan. But even after they recovered, many people came back for more care, and he learned that this was because of food shortages and unsafe drinking water caused by drought. Nakamura began developing infrastructure and rehabilitating farmland, digging wells and building irrigation canals to provide clean drinking water. At the time, he was adamant about making things using local materials rather than bringing in machines and materials from other countries. This meant that repairs could be made using local resources, without relying on foreigners, so that the projects wouldn’t become just fleeting support.
When I think about educational programs, it’s important that local people can keep them going using the materials available there. Rather than pushing ahead from a Tokyo point of view when spending time and sharing experiences with locals, I look closely at how art is rooted in the region to put together a plan. I think that this is due to Nakamura’s influence.

Nakamura was shot dead while still working in 2019, but it seems that he had an impact in unexpected places. What kinds of things are you currently doing at YCAM?

Mitome: The reason that I moved to YCAM in the first place was because I thought that I’d be able to work without boundaries between curation and education. At many public art museums these functions are siloed, or sometimes a curator is required to handle both because there is not enough staff. While it’s important to create an appealing exhibition, it’s equally important to connect the works to the audience. While working across the boundary of curation and education, I’m interested in acting as a go-between who connects works to the audience.

Along with community collaboration, your work also revolves around feminism. When did you first become aware of feminism?

Mitome: It began when I was a teenager helping sociologist Ueno Chizuko, whose research included feminism and the family. Transcribing tapes of her lectures provided an opportunity to listen carefully to her ideas, and I realized that it was thanks to elder feminists like her that the world has gradually improved for our generation.

When you were a teenager in the early 2000s, feminism wasn’t as visible as it is now. But it was during that time that you were inspired by Ueno.

Mitome: The first exhibition I planned as the main curator at the Towada Art Center was the exhibition Interpreter (2022) by Momose Aya. It explored the imbalances that arise in our communications with others, and questions around the body, sexuality, and gender. At this exhibition she unveiled Etude for a Voice Actor, a new sound installation based on the theme of female voice actors. In this work, only a voice can be heard, and there is no animation showing the appearance or gestures of the character that would make it possible to ascertain their sex. Thus, this voice disconnected from image manifests as a fluid presence that transcends gender. Many of the young people who came to this exhibition were relatively receptive to the topic of gender. Although the topic is ordinarily hard to talk about, I sensed that this work was creating openings that could help people feel safe to talk.

Aoyagi Natsumi, who is creating the exhibition along with you through the JUMP project, previously mounted the Logbook of a Sea Goddess exhibition at Towada Art Center. Why did you choose Aoyagi for this project?

Mitome: After being selected as a curator for JUMP, I talked with mentors and other curators about the project, and eventually, of the three museums overseas, I was assigned to CAM in Lisbon. Then, I thought about the artists whose exhibitions would be suitable for CAM and I came up with a list of a dozen names. These were mainly artists of the same generation who have a track record in Japan but have been rarely shown overseas. I had little knowledge of Lisbon, so I initially had a vague idea that I wanted to create an exhibition that was connected to the Portuguese painter and Illustrator Paula Rego (whose work deals with themes such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy and colonialism).
While I was struggling to narrow the list of candidates, in December 2024 I visited CAM along with Kataoka Mami, who is serving as a JUMP mentor, and this significantly updated my understanding of the project. Firstly, CAM, where the exhibition is to be held, is a building with many faces: the exterior is sometimes seamlessly connected to the interior by glass and sometimes completely shut out. Seeing that, I wondered who could create an installation that would fully exploit this fascinating yet challenging space? Thinking about it, I became convinced that Aoyagi would be able to make the most of this space in a compelling way.
The work will be birthed at CAM, and it is not as if it could come into existence at any other museum—it will be created from nothing starting with the research conducted in Portugal. Aoyagi’s works have examined the themes of ‘Mazu’ (the goddess of navigation worshipped mainly in China and Taiwan) and ‘invisible beings.’ I thought that we could connect these to Portugal’s Marian devotion and the country’s tradition of importing and exporting culture through navigation, and this was a major factor.

In May 2025 you were in Portugal to conduct research with Aoyagi. During your two-week research trip, you visited not only Lisbon, where CAM is located, but also other cities like Fatima and Porto.

Mitome: In this research trip, I was especially impressed by the public washhouses (lavadouros) found all over Portugal. When I saw Abraham’s Valley (1993) by Manoel de Oliveira, one of Portugal’s leading film directors, the washhouse scene left strong impression on me. When I shared this with Aoyagi, she was also very interested. So during this research trip we visited a number of lavadouros. These washhouses have been used by the local people since ancient times, and some are still in use even though most people now have washing machines. We actually visited about fourteen of these facilities, but there are many lavadouros that aren’t shown on maps, so my impression was that there are many of them in the places we visited.

It seems like we can gain some insights into the local community through these public washhouses. Will this exhibition likewise be a window into your thinking on the themes of feminism and the role of art museums?

Mitome: To be honest, I’m not yet quite sure. When I was in Portugal last December, the artist Leonor Antunes was showing the works of thirty-three female artists that she had chosen after a comprehensive review of the works in the CAM collection. And when I was there in May, the museum was presenting an exhibition of the works of Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão. Both exhibitions, presented in CAM’s main gallery space, were on the theme of feminism. I was encouraged by this, and I’d like to create an exhibition that fits in with CAM’s stance.

I think that in Japan some visitors would shy away from exhibitions that deal with political topics like feminism. Do you think that in Portugal people are ready to embrace these kinds of exhibitions?

Mitome: I think so. When I went to the Museu Nacional de Etnologia (National Museum of Ethnology) in Lisbon, there was an exhibition on Portuguese colonialism in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and I saw words to the effect that learning about the history of Africa implies deciphering colonial values that have remained in Portuguese society and, hence, helping towards decolonizing its imaginary. Portugal established colonies around the world during the Age of Discovery, and Portuguese culture today derives from a complex mix of cultural elements, as can be seen in fado, a genre of folk music that emerged from the interaction between Portugal and its colonies in Brazil, Africa, and elsewhere. It’s remarkable that an exhibition addressing political themes and critically examining Portugal’s control and subjugation of such lands and peoples has a number of corporate sponsors. It seems like there is an environment that allows important themes to be examined without self-censorship.

On another topic, there are quite a few mentors for the JUMP program. What kind of relationship do you have with them?

Mitome: On my first visit [to Portugal] last December, I was accompanied by curator Kataoka Mami, and as a curator, I learned a lot from watching how Kataoka works. She doesn’t just look at the exhibits. She always talks with the local museum staff and builds relationships with them. How is the museum run? What’s the size of its budget? What kind of people visit? Talking with people about these things again and again builds trust and creates connections. As a curator, it made me keenly aware of the importance of face-to-face communication.

It seems like being able to watch more experienced curators in action firsthand will be a great asset in your future endeavors. Lastly, I’d like to ask your thoughts on how you want your project to play out.

Mitome: Aoyagi Natsumi’s exhibition will be shown at CAM in 2026, but the program itself will continue for a five-year period, including creation of a publication that contains a written record of the project and presentation of an exhibition in Japan. I hope that visitors in Yamaguchi City will also learn about our activities through the exhibition we put on here. I don’t want to keep this valuable experience to myself. I want to share it with the rest of the YCAM staff. It’s still in the concept stage, but if I can work with YCAM’s education team to come up with tools that would allow people to look at CAM’s exhibitions, it could be a rare opportunity for other staff, too. I’ll cherish the connections made here even after the project is over. And of course, with an eye to the future, I’d like to keep deepening my relationships with not only CAM, but also with participants like the Museum of Art, Kochi and the Shiga Museum of Art.

June 2, 2025