Noritoshi Motoda

On Noritoshi Motoda San

Technology deceives us with the stability of mediums; the screen offers the casual connection with remote friends and collaborators. When that screen dies we find ourselves in the archive of memory and our volatile notes. When Tatsumi Orimoto died in February last year has archive was left in the safe hands of Noritoshi Motoda.

Over 30 years of collaboration with Orimoto, Motoda had been ever present; sculpting the bread onto performers in the famous Bread man performances and overseeing the installation of every artwork.

Noritoshi Motoda was an artist with a complex personal body of work, ranging from public readings of Jacques Derrida to complex installations on subjects as varied as fan culture and health care. From a position of deep reflection and observation he documented and organised the work of Orimoto through the Art Mama Foundation they established to manage the busy international schedule of exhibition and performances.

Always patient and rigorous Motoda attended to the thankless task of ensuring that the archives and images capturing the performances were contextualised with biographical detail and insights into the process of production. Most of the images were taken Motoda himself, insisting on analogue cameras and always shooting infront of the audiences to get the best views on Orimoto’s art. It is a figure warped in loose shirts, jackets with cameras and assorted bags strapped to him that his image persists.

The image of a person who loved their subject, sensitive to how meaning is captured and drawing in the observations of audiences into the making of a scene. For Motoda the moment of performance was a screen between him and Orimoto which would dissolve in the aftermath of the performance when he would be erased and only Orimoto and the spectacle remained.

 This symbiosis of perception allows us to be inlaces we were not from Nepal to Liverpool, Kawasaki to Sydney, Hiroshima to Venice: all of the frames meticulously logged and edited, printed for exhibition, shared with curators internationally, printed as retrospective posters.

Motoda last attended to this task for With Bread at Aoyama Meguro Gallery in February 2026. With Gallery Director Hideki Aoyama he planned and help organise the memorial exhibition, discussed which works should be included and how they could invite curators and audiences to a personal tour in which he would speak for the works of Orimoto.

On FaceTime he explained that one of the more curious pieces was a hand baked loaf of bread which many years ago he had preserved with varnish and although it looked good they were worried it contained Cockroaches. I had suggested freezing this object as that is a tactic conservationists adopt to neutralise the possibility of life in a work. We also talked about the portraits of Odai Orimoto with The Big Bread which had been specially baked in oversized Dada style. A special present on her birthday. We also spoke about the people you came to see the exhibition, curators and members of the new generation of the Orimoto family living in Tokyo.

The conversation touched on the money for the publication we had made celebrating Orimoto’s life work and the tasks to do on the archives. He was back in Fukuoka or more precisely his home in the country where in an old barn he kept salvaged building materials of recently demolished wooden houses and the archives of Art Mama Foundation which had been moved from the home and studio of Orimoto in Kawasaki.

Seeing the barn was a surprise to me. I did not know he lived in a rural area. He explained his sister runs the small holding. I was in shock that he owned a pick up truck as I had no idea that he could drive. It turns out you can know people for more than 30 years and have little comprehension of the life they lead when they step out of the frame.

That is what has happened now for the last time and our conversation was not over. It is now suspended in that media crash that comes with death. All of his data trapped in hard drives and on negatives; all of his thoughts preserved in a script I cannot read.

I will no longer share the Google translation of our meeting notes. I will no longer share mediated time with Motoda only this incommensurate time of memory and loss. It is reassuring to know that he is greatly appreciated in Japan where friends and colleagues know and celebrated his modesty, intellect and joyful human countenance.

As Orimoto san shouts from the other side we wave goodbye to Motoda san who has now crossed the Sanzu river.