The film, “Illuminating the Collections”, is derived from an ongoing, long-term filming project conducted by the Museum, depicting how the villager of Huesio village named Fish, who has struggled with insomnia for years, utilizes various light sources to illuminate all types of museum collections.
Collection number C-ANT0008 is a mid-nineteenth-century brass samovar produced at the Vorontsov Brothers factory in Tula, Russia. The appearance of the samovar is similar to the one owned by Yan, the role of the novel by the late Japanese writer Jun Machida.
Set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the short story series follows the journey of "Yan", born in Odessa, during the turbulent upheaval of the revolution. His journey of seeking refuge takes him across Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea before finally arriving in Istanbul. The creation of this series of shorts began in 1996, when Jun Machida was forced to close his "Odessa-Istanbul" teahouse in Shibuya, Tokyo. (The café was said to have been designed to incorporate elements of Istanbul’s coffee shop "Cafe Pierre Loti", with those of Odessa, which was at the time the southern gateway of the Russian Empire), due to plans for urban renewal.
The Huesio Geological Museum currently houses the entirety of Jun Machida’s out-of-print series of original novels, as well as puppets of the novel characters hand-made by Mariko Machida, and music records made for the novel "Yan" Series by Jun and Mariko, etc. The second Illuminating the Collections project has the collection item C-ANT0008 samovar as its center piece. Using a 40W tungsten filament bulb and B&Q E27 classic clip lamp to illuminate the "neck" of the samovar, an interpretation of the scene in the novel where "Yan" watches his friend "Pike" walk towards the grasslands afar under the moonlight is achieved.
Jun Machida
Born in Tokyo in 1951, graduated from Keio University's College of Economics. In 1996, Jun Machida began to write the novel "Yan" series based on his experiences of traveling to Russia by ship from Niigata Port in the 1980s with his wife Mariko. Among his works, " Yan and the Pike " and " Yan and the Christmas Tree " have been translated into English, Chinese, Korean and Thai editions. After Jun Machida passed away in 2011, Mariko Machida continues to interpret Jun Machida's literary world through her puppet creation and publishes on the website founded by Jun and Mariko.
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