Nuit Blanch Kyoto is one of the result of the collaboration between Paris and Kyoto as sister-cities. It is an art festival that have been hold every summer for 15 years in Kyoto with open exhibition all over the city. 

For this edition, Jules Goliath is one of the artist that were selected to create and expose in Kyoto. 

His project is an art performance based on human encounter and exchanges, excluding any monetary aspect. 

The performance consisted of traveling with various objects brought from France, each individually wrapped in a furoshiki and all together carried inside a larger furoshiki (see first picture).
Jules Goliath then walked through the streets of Kyoto, offering to exchange one of his objects with whatever the people he encountered wished to trade.

During each exchange, he would carefully unwrap every object in front of the stranger, and after the trade, wrap the new item in a fresh furoshiki before handing it over. The furoshiki were thus used as part of this ceremonial act of exchange — symbolizing the meeting itself, with the object becoming the tangible trace of an otherwise fleeting human encounter.

We were very happy to provide Jules Goliath with furoshiki as part of our ReFuroshiki initiative, which promotes reuse and the spread of sustainable practices through furoshiki. Some of the furoshiki used by the French artist had already belonged to previous owners and were now continuing their journey with someone new, further reinforcing the symbolism of human connection.

The deeply meaningful objects exchanged during this performance reflect how profoundly people were touched by the project.
The object shown in the picture below is a piece of sandstone found by one participant while walking on the beach with his late father, who had loved to travel. He was moved by the idea that, through this exchange, his father would somehow continue to travel alongside the French artist.

This sandstone was exchanged for a piece of marble that Jules Goliath had brought back from a trip to Greece.