Mention honorable dans la catégorie « Écriture Poétique »

My name is Dalí Nelio. I come from a Zapotec town in Southern Mexico where only a thin line exists between the spiritual world and our everyday life. In 2023 I took a portrait of my friend Sabino Guisu, a contemporary Zapotec artist, on a trip through Kyoto. One night he started playing his ‘Heart Arp’ and I snapped this photograph, after a long evening of sake, soju, and stories about consciousness, the soul, and spirits. That night I gazed out at what I could call a spirit of the woods (also called Kodama), and suddenly an orb of light ran through the room leaving me speechless. The next morning I woke up early to walk towards the old Kyoto district where I took a double exposure of the film from that night. It wasn’t until I came back to my hometown and developed the film where I was shocked at seeing that this photograph represented what was living in my head during those days. The music of the heart, the visions of a soul, sharing a life that I can also call a spiritual journey. All represented in a single photograph "Sonata of a Kodama".

This photo has never been shown or revealed, one of the main photographs from my forthcoming photobook titled Asakuza.