“It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. […] But it is also to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, right where it slips away.”
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996)
Derrida called it archive fever—that obsessive, looping desire to hold onto something. It’s a longing to return to the beginning, even as that origin remains out of reach. The archive becomes a space of both memory and loss. This tension lingers heavily in Sena Sasaki’s exhibition, I hear nothing but the sound of the scissors on my head, the artist’s first in Germany and the inaugural show at Petrine’s new Düsseldorf space.
At the heart of Derrida’s thinking is a paradox: the impulse to preserve is deeply human, but never neutral. To archive something is to pull it out of time, to immobilise it. Sasaki’s work feels shaped by that dynamic. The paintings and video don’t stabilise memory-they let it flicker. What’s preserved here isn’t information-it’s the shape of forgetting itself.
In the first room are six paintings from Sasaki’s North Star series. Each one depicts a version of the Hokushinki, the first official flag of Hokkaido, used between 1872 and 1882, following Japan’s annexation of the island. Before that, the territory was known as Ezo, home to the Indigenous Ainu people. Few images of the flag exist today-just fragments, a few black-and-white photographs, scattered documentation in museums.
Rather than treat the flag as a fixed object, Sasaki returns to it over and over again. The paintings repeat the same basic form-red and white, or blue and red-but each version carries subtle changes in surface, tone, and execution, all titled with the date of their completion. These works don’t claim to recover a lost national symbol. Instead, they dwell in its disappearance. They hold space for a fragment that has slipped out of history’s reach and refuse to let it go completely.
In the next room, the video installation expands this logic. I hear nothing but the sound of the scissors on my head is a six-channel loop of visual and sonic absence. The imagery is sparse: steam rising from a volcano, breath in the winter air. Constructed using subtitles, each line describes a sound-a sigh, laughter, footsteps, an animal, a machine.
Watching the piece becomes a kind of reading. You start to feel the presence of what’s missing more than what’s shown. These are fragments of affect: emotional and physical gestures stripped of their origin. Without bodies, without context, the descriptions become untethered. The result is disorientating, intimate, and familiar. It feels like being left alone with someone else’s memories, all sense of sequence erased.
This is where Derrida’s ideas echo most clearly. The archive, he argues, is never neutral. It’s an architecture of power-of what’s allowed to remain and what is quietly erased. Sasaki doesn’t try to rewrite that structure. Instead, the work sits within it, quietly pulling at its seams. What if an archive wasn’t a place of clarity but of unresolved feeling? What if memory wasn’t stable, but cyclical, scattered, barely there?
The North Star-Polaris-appears throughout the exhibition. It was the symbol on the Hokushinki, and has long served as a navigational anchor. But Polaris, too, is a phantom. The light we see is delayed. The star we follow may already be gone. In this exhibition, the flag, the voice, the body-none of it returns whole. Everything flickers in delay, residue, repetition.
There is no clean narrative here. What’s offered instead is a loop, a gesture, a refusal to forget what can’t be fully retrieved. These works are not about recovery. They’re about attention-about the persistence of what still hums beneath the surface, that which exists outside the confines of the archive.
(1) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.
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Sena Sasaki (b. 1990, Tokyo) is based in Hokkaido. Recent exhibitions include Petrine, Paris (2024); and Commercial Street at 5152 La Vista Court & 709 N Hill St (2021).
Clara Bruni (b. 1995 in London, UK) is a writer who lives between London and Barcelona.
