As part of the time-based exhibition and architectural set-up Dance Floor as Study Room, at YCAM (Yamaguchi, JP), wendelien van oldenborgh has conceived a new film work, tentatively called A Prelude. Filmed in Aoyama Hachi and Kinone Pension (including the road towards it), the wor follows a group of people dancing, walking, reading, and discussing various aspects of conflict, life struggles and their answers to this with initiatives and creative work. Throughout the film, they exchange personal stories and insights on several historical figures and events, each scen bringing differing but overlapping issues.

The two locations in the film are tributes to the act of protest and resistance against authoritarian power and are also used for queer-inclusive rave parties organised by WAIFU and SLICK—both started by a female collective after the exclusion of a trans-woman from a lesbian bar in Shinjuku’ gay area Ni-Chōme. Aoyama Hachi is a small club in the Shibuya area of Tokyo that hosted the
first WAIFU parties in 2019. Kinone Pension is a house surrounded by a garden and strong metal walls squeezed between the runways of Narita Airport. The group that built the house has not let go of their land, and the airport was forced around it, a memento from the Sanrinzuka Struggles,
which has called for the halt of airport construction from 1966 to the present.

The conversations also evoke another field of reference through the work of two influential female artists from the area of Yamaguchi. The author Fumiko Hayashi and pioneer filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka expressed a strong feminist and class-conscious perspective in the middle of the las century through their popular novels, stories and films.

As a continuation of the collaborative element of van oldenborgh’s work, several protagonists from her previous film ‘of girls’ are seen and heard alongside a few new members in the current cast, all with personal and professional connections to the movements and issues addressed. Their
appearance in the film connects us to queer feminist presence in a world still dominated by patriarchal values.



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Installation view