las barcas is a loose collective of younger artists, photographers, critical theorists, and creative writers whose works create new conditions of possibility for arts and thoughts in and about Okinawa, Japan, and the world.

las barcas publishes new types of visual images, critical ideas, and dialogues that question the current schema of politics and arts in Okinawa, Japan, and the world at large. We aim to do this by critically calling into question the essentialist, hierarchical constructions of culture and gender while avoiding the dominant binarism of universalism and particularism that at once naturalizes and hierarchizes the figures of nation-state. Instead, las barcas is interested in community that has heretofore not existed, in landscape that cannot be made a property of one person or one group, and in bodies that explore an ethics of sexuality.

Edited and published by its editorial collective based in Naha, Okinawa, las barcas aims to open an egalitarian space where artists, curators, and writers will unlearn the institutional division and work with one another more freely.

Our three volumes have also featured the works of internationally well-known artists and critics including Naoki Sakai (Critical Theory), Ryudai Takano, (Photography), Chihiro Minato (Photography and Criticism), Gozo Yoshimasu (Poetry), and Takao Kawaguchi (Performance Art).

las barcas 1(June 2011) features photography and artwork by Satoko Nema, Chikako Yamashiro, Kaori Nakasone, Yu Shiraki, and Gozo Yoshimasu and contains a dialogue between art curator Yumiko Okada and performance artist Takao Kawaguchi. It also includes critical essays on translation and transnationality by Naoki Sakai, on abstract painter Adaniya Masayoshi by Mayumo Inoue, and on ethics of sexuality by Ikuo Shinjo.

las barcas 2 (December 2012) features photography and artwork by Kiyoko Sakata, Chikako Yamashiro, Kaori Nakasone, Satoko Nema, Ryudai Takano, Ryohei Masuda, and Chihiro Minato. It also includes a dialogue on shadow and politics between Ryudai Takano, a photographer and recipient of the Kimura Award, and Ikuo Shinjo. Critical essays by Mayumo Inoue, Yutaka Yoshida, Kiwako Ogata, and Tetsu Oyakawa and an epistolary exchange between Yumiko Okada (curator) and Haruka Hama (film festival programmer) are also collected therein.

las barcas: An Extra Issue, our latest and full-color issue, has been just published in October, 2014. In addition to the artworks by Nema, Yamashiro, Sakata, and Nakasone, and critical and novelistic contributions from Shinjo, Inoue, and Oyakawa, it contains both photography and essay by Ryudai Takano, and still photographs from Queer Fish Road (Hengyoro), a work-in-progress feature-length film by Go Takamine.

Please send your general comment and purchase inquiry to: lasbarcas2011(at)gmail.com.