Briac Le Milinaire
France
Briac is a visual artist and photographer whose work explores documentary practices and photographic printing techniques. Often drawing on personal or historical archives, his projects are driven by a desire to preserve stories that are at risk of disappearing, or may already have disappeared. To this end, he experiments with a range of materials and printing processes, including silver gelatin printing on fabric, Risograph books, and albumen printing. For him, these techniques are not merely processes, but ways of paying the most meaningful tribute possible to subjects threatened by oblivion.
Instagram• SERIES •
Those Who Pray Still Do
The Okinawa archipelago in Japan, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom until its annexation in 1879, lies on the edge of the East China Sea. Its strategic position as a major trading hub enabled the kingdom to flourish culturally and economically for more than four centuries.
This cultural exchange forged a strong and distinctive identity, notably characterized by a unique animist religion organized around female priestesses known as Noros (“Those Who Pray Still Do”). At the heart of the kingdom’s political, religious, and social life, they played a major role in its prosperity. However, following the annexation and the arrival of other major religions in the archipelago, the Ryukyu religion gradually began to disappear. In 1978, the last initiation ceremony for priestesses, known as Izaiho, was held. None has taken place since.
In the autumn of 2022, I met Maeda, one of the last active Noros. She practices on Kudaka, the sacred island of the archipelago, an open-air sanctuary that can be walked around in an hour and is home to more than fifty prayer sites shaped by nature.
Through a photographic series combining portraits, places, organic and mineral materials, this project pays tribute to the guardians of a disappearing religion and gives visual form to rituals that are vanishing alongside the landscapes and people that give them meaning.
