Hospitality
Opening spaces and times to bring the healing power of ancient forests everywhere into the heart of modern life, where humans are not physically among trees.
From my past professional background in brand experience, I use what I've learned to activate and to adapt the Kodama experience in any place and audience.
Public spaces, corporate spaces, schools, hospitals, shops, and windows, places for healing, teaching, performing arts, doing research, practicing spirituality: the purpose is to bring a poetic echo to the voice of the trees everywhere into daily life.
To raise awareness on forest
through a customer experience
Maison Aribert, France
Guide Michelin **
Restaurant and Hotel
Permanent photo installation (2019)
When the ancestral forest supports, inspires, and gives care to contemporary society by inviting itself into the heart of our daily lives.
Through the Kodama project, reconnecting with trees does not happen exclusively in the forest, but also in our living spaces, closer to our daily lives, through installations of images, words, sounds, and smells that fit just as well into the care pathway of a medical facility as into the customer experience of a commercial establishment, as long as common values and intentions animate the places that host them.
This is the case with this collaboration with Maison Aribert, whose chef draws his culinary inspiration, philosophy, and commitments from the nearby Vercors forests where he was born. Since its opening in 2019, this hotel-restaurant, with two Michelin stars and one Michelin green star, has carried the vibration of the Yakushima forest within its walls through a permanent exhibition of my texts and photos.
This experience opens up time and space to the energy of this ancient forest, in a contemplative and meditative journey that echoes the spirit of the tree, inviting us to reconnect with the forest, rediscover its virtuous powers, and open our minds to the importance of recreating this vital osmosis with the world of trees.
Thank you to Chef Christophe Aribert for his trust and continued support. Thank you to Laetitia Debeausse for initiating and leading this collaboration. Thank you to the teams at the restaurant for their enlightened professionalism, to the restaurant's customers, and to the buyers of the prints who make the Kodama project possible.
Free admission. Photos available for purchase upon request at the reception desk. Pigment printing on 100% plant-based Japanese washi paper. Size: 40x55 cm. Editions of 5, numbered and signed.
To raise awareness on forest
through a customer experience
Twelve hotel rooms turned into a forest meditation place
Yadoya Hiraiwa Ryokan,
a traditional Japanese inn located in Kyoto
Permanent photo installation (2022)
Photos©Frederic Leyre
A selection of 20 large photos prints from Sugi Meditation series and Mangrove Meditation series are dispatched in the tatami rooms and entrance, to create a meditative mood in this cultural heritage of Japanese architecture, a representative example of a tea house built with wood.
I removed there the 12 photographs exhibited during the Kyotographie Festival, and I re-used all the tree branches of Kitayama Daisugi's scenography to create a pergola on the house's rooftop to bring the shadow to the building during the warm summers of Kyoto. All parts of the former exhibition have been reused, even the dried cedar leaf that covers the soil around the house, as mulching.
Behind the scene of this meditative installation, there is an up-cycling project.
To raise awareness on forest
through a customer experience
[Ki:] Restaurant, Kyoto
Organic Cuisine
Restaurant
Permanent photo installation (2021)
Photos©Frederic Leyre
The photos "Silence" and "Kodama" found their natural place in the middle of the main room of this organic restaurant, open in a renovated wooden machiya, a traditional Kyoto house.
Here, the team cooks vegetables that come directly from their family farm. By collaborating with soil, water, and wind in the fields daily, they create an authentic cuisine experience inspired by nature. Such an inspiring way to invite people to reconnect with the soul of the forest, with the Living, using the gifts of Mother Earth to feed our bodies, minds, and souls, as the forest does.
Project in development
HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE
Through a meditative photo installation, I wish to create an art therapy experience of the forest and, according to sanitary constraints, add sensory elements like soundscapes and smells.
The hospital is one of the places where people are cut off from the living forces of nature and forest, and it would act contrary to revive the living there. However, through large immersive prints, the memory of this ancestral reconnection triggers in everyone, awakening the powerful sensation of the saving link to the tree and in consciousness with a therapeutic intention.
I aim to organize this experience under a medical team by monitoring the effect on patients' and staff's wellness. In addition, the purpose is to share the results and spread the benefits of this contribution from the forest to other health facilities
In 2021, the artist Chrystel. Lebas has set an immersive photo installation within the North Wing of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London.
Gallery Photo: Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection
In consciousness, I pass the energy of the forest to people. My photos and installations aim to convey its healing effect.
I have been a Reiki healer for 15 years. I've observed the powerful energy of ancient forests, increasingly active as it directly benefits human wellness. From a scientific perspective, contemporary research is progressing quickly in this way.
I aim to create complementarities between the forest healing effects and medical teams.
A hospital built in 2019 in the Norwegian forest, only 650 feet from the Oslo University Hospital. Patients can spend time surrounded by nature, which can have a positive impact not only on their physical but also mental health. Photo: Ivar Kvaal/courtesy Studio Snøhetta
I started research to explore this way to connect humans with the benefits of the forest, in particular from recent hospital studies that tend to prove the therapeutic benefits of forest images on patients, as the following 2 examples:
• The smile effect of nature images on hospital patients
What is a nice smile like that doing in a place like this?
Automatic affective responses to environments influence the recognition of facial expressions
— An affective priming paradigm with pictures of environmental scenes and facial expressions as primes and targets, respectively, was employed in order to investigate the role of natural (e.g., vegetation) and built elements (e.g., buildings) in eliciting rapid affective responses.
— In all, the present results provide evidence that perception of environmental scenes elicits automatic affective responses and influences recognition of facial expressions.
Jari K Hietanen, Terhi Klemettilä, Jani E Kettunen, Kalevi M Korpela PMID: 16642346 DOI: 10.1007/s00426-006-0064-4
• Art nature views effects in hospital
Evidence-based art in the hospital
Published in Wien Med Wochenschr, 2021 Aug 2. Axel Fudickar, Dag Konetzka, Stine Maria Louring Nielsen, and Kathy Hathorn. PubMed doi: 10.1007/s10354-021-00861-7)
— According to the theory of psychological evolution, human beings experience nature views as calming and refreshing due to their adaptation to survival in nature, because a tendency to fecund and watery areas (Biophilia) may have anchored a preference for the corresponding pictures and colors in human brains [7]
— Biophilia is confirmed by an older study resulting in less analgesic consumption, less minor complications and earlier discharge from hospital of patients with a view on nature in comparison with patients who had a view on a wall [40].
— Moreover, nature views can distract from stressful events, because they bind awareness by positive associations including the notion of being far away, fascination by spectacular sights, feelings of freedom and connection with the outer world [41].
— Aesthetic experience of nature views is also easier for patients with cognitive impairment by stressful events, because nature views are easy to understand due to their familiarity [41]
7. Lankston L, Cusack P, Fremantle C, et al. Visual art in hospitals: case studies and review of the evidence. J R Soc Med. 2010;103:490–499. doi: 10.1258/jrsm 2010.100256.
40. Kaplan R, Kaplan S. The experience of nature: a psychological perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1989.
41. Reber R, Schwarz N, Winkelman P. Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: is beauty in the perceiver’s processing experience? Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2004;8:364–382