Japan - Kyoto
After two years of research and preparation in Japan, Barnabé Fillion, the creative founder of Arpa, dedicates 2026 to open a new structure in Kyoto—a 120-year-old machiya dedicated to the development of multiple projects. Here, Arpa’s work enters into dialogue with the architecture itself and the Japanese conception of space, exploring intersections of research, heritage, and a quietly retrofuturistic vision. Unfolding like a travel notebook: listening the scent of a living atlas of images, sounds, fragrance and encounters, attentive to the invisible and latent potential of materials. From April this year we will unveil a series of works in Kyoto.
After careful renovation, Fillion’s machiya in Kyoto has been restored with respect for its original configuration. Certain spaces: the Chashitsu tea room, the scented moss garden, and time-shaped stone sculptures, have been preserved and curated again. Once a renowned workshop of naturally-dyed obi fabrics, used for refined Kyoto kimono, the house now becomes a creative synesthetic laboratory. Here, music unfolds within a listening room featuring one of the first complete Western Electric sound systems, made in 1929, another room celebrates the kōdō incense ceremony – an essential practice for Barnabé’s work. Here, Fillion constructs new works based on relationships between architecture of scent and cultural heritage, upplanting old fictions with nuanced dialogues. Spaces become an olfactory exercise, blurring the line between fiction and reality, inviting intimate interrogation, and opening perception to new, sometimes unexpected, associations.
Working within Arpa’s new studio in Kyoto, Barnabé develops a body of research where images – often produced through photographic techniques and an inquiry into light, material, and colours – interact with sound and fragrance, continuously generating the MAP OF CONFUSION: an atlas where visual, olfactory, and spatial narratives converge. Barnabé’s works, conceived as speculative fiction, trace continuities between biological, technological, and inert matter that learn, evolve, and modify themselves through processes of absorption, concentration, dilution, and diffusion. This research unfolds through Fragments of Light, the concept investigated further in the upcoming exhibition taking place in early April in Kyoto. As part of this new constellation in Kyoto, Arpa is opening its first gallery, presenting all its scents, inviting visitors to inhabit a porous, shape-shifting environment, where matter and imagination fold into one another.