Photographic drift in Saint-Denis in the footsteps of the ghost of Osugi Sakae, Japanese anarchist-activist who would have held a speech there 100 years ago. A way for artists to put the urban reality of le Grand Paris under pressure.
Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber traveled and photographed through Saint-Denis following the footsteps of Japanese anarchist Sakae Osugi. He made a speech in this city on May 1st 1923, before being expelled and murdered a few months later by the military police in Japan. This book is one of the many pieces of evidence of the situationist investigation that artists operate in different metropolises around the world (Osaka, Tokyo, Paris, Chongqing...) grouped under the name of “Cartographie Dynamique”.
The text that accompanies this book is the fruit of another wandering, that of Marie Tesson, from Saint-Denis to the Pleyel Tower. A way of extending the reflection on what lies beneath the many layers of the city’s architecture, particularly those of the megacity.
This book is co-edited with Böhm Kobayashi.
It got the support of the CNAP (Centre national des arts plastiques)
Nouveau Palais is a french publishing house with documentary photography as main subject.
We value the text and the way it can work with pictures.
Web Credits
Design : Juliette Duhé et Sébastien Riollier
Code : Élie Quintard
Sakae Ōsugi (*1885, †1923) was a Japanese anarchist; an important socialist, later anarcho-syndicalist activist, publicist and theoretician of the Taishō period. On 20 Nov 1922 he got an invitation to attend the 2nd International Anarchist Congress in Berlin in Feb 1923. After borrowing the necessary 1.000 Yen in travel expenses from the writer Arishima Takeo and others, he travelled to Shanghai on 13 Dec. where comrades helped him obtain a false Chinese passport on the names Chin Chen aka Tong Chin Tangle. He landed in Marseille on 13 Feb on a French ship. He didn’t get the necessary foreigner‘s identity card issued in Lyon. Nevertheless, he travelled to Paris. He canceled his plans to travel to Berlin instead he stayed in Paris and gave a May Day speech in the north Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. There he was arrested by civilian police who knew about his presence in Europe. He was sentenced to three weeks in prison and deportation for passport offences. On 2 June he was sent back to Japan where he later was murdered – together with his second wife feminist and anarchist Itō Noe and a nephew – in Tokyo on 16 Sept 1923 by military police. The police used the chaotic situation during the great Kantō earthquake to cover up several murders of political prisoners. Sakaes murder is known as the Amakasu Incident.