Being my friend

For seven days, from October 3 to 10, 2021, tsu-tsu performed as a friend who had died suddenly in a car accident one year earlier. The performance was based on three hours of audio that had been recorded by chance shortly before the accident — an ordinary conversation whose preservation was entirely accidental.

In the immediate aftermath of the death, tsu-tsu found it unbearable that those left behind — including himself — were already turning the friend into a symbol: a figure of tragedy, an occasion for collective grief. He refused to let that happen. What he wanted was not to mourn a simplified image, but to remember the person in full complexity — the specific way he spoke, his habits, his mannerisms, the texture of his presence. The relationship between two people who knew each other — not the public narrative of a loss — was what could not be allowed to disappear.

This was the first work in which tsu-tsu named his method “Documentary Acting” and presented it publicly. By listening repeatedly to the recording and rehearsing the friend’s speech patterns and gestures, tsu-tsu discovered that traces of the performed person remain in the performer’s body — not as imitation, but as something closer to an acquired habit. As he has described it: “If you see someone with a way of smoking that you admire and you start copying it, it becomes part of you. The personality encountered through Documentary Acting stays in the body in the same way.”

The friend had dreamed of establishing a shared space where artists could live and work together. That dream became 6okken, the artist-run residency that tsu-tsu co-founded the following year at Lake Kawaguchi. In this sense, the performance did not end — the friend’s presence continues to shape the conditions in which tsu-tsu lives and works.