Site-specific immersive installation
Location: Sakagura Gallery, Aso-city, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan
Dimension: 3.8 x 12.5 x 10.5 M [installation]
HD, 19:47 [video]
Material: cedar-chips, tables, metal-mesh, polyethylene, Tokyo Blue film gel, sound
Material: cedar-chips, tables, metal-mesh, polyethylene, Tokyo Blue film gel, sound
Art Residency: International Artist-in-Residence Programme in Aso
On
entering Sakagura Galley I immediately noticed a vast room filled
with loads of fragile metal-meshed tables. They were leaning towards
each other as if afraid to stay without some kind of ephemeral and
more vague than themselves support.
Instantly
I had a feeling as if I had seen those tables being embraced in a
deep blue light. Cedar chips, I were planning to dispense over the
base of 'SYU IRO', formed a dense net of mountains on both levels
making mesh partially visible while cedar chips themselves
superimposed over each other as if on translucent layers of a tracing
paper.
From
the first time of my visit to Japan a strong imprint was embossed
inside my memory – a cicada sound. Starting to record it, I ended
up with a collection of various sounds reflecting on my life events
during the second visit. These deliberately unmodified sounds became
an extra, new to me at that time, dimension of site-specific art
work. I mean, new in a way that the sound was extracted not from the
materials of the installation [although cedar chips were perfectly
performing this function when being touched, and they also were
responsible for the smell] but rather was recorded, processed and
coming out of the speakers into the space.
I
wanted sound to stay clear and crisp without generating any
confusions or false associations – if it was cicada you heard
cicada, not a complicated mixture of noises easily taken for
instrumental composition or something alike. By staying in their
original simplicity, howbeit edited and mixed up in-between each
other, they would have stayed in a contrast to an ambiguous
complexity of the whole environment, I thought.
Moreover,
no one would be able to listen to the whole 'sound track' as it was
composed over 40-50 minutes,– thus, by jumping into the space and
out everyone ended up with totally different experience. Depending
what pat of my Japanese life they came across with. I believe, in
this particular case, sound was a crucial element influencing overall
understanding of the work.
Performances
came later. Naturally travelling from Art-Plex they twisted
themselves into a totally different shape, however keeping some
connection with the original 'cedar chips performance'. Somewhere on
a level of traces. Because initially performance was a film. Titled
'The cReature', it constituted
an integrated part of the nine-room installation 'That Side Where
Real Is'. 'The cReature' was in a room with enormous amount of dry
lives immersed in red light – only one TV out of three was active.
I thought about them as a cemetery of broken TV-s or something.
Frankly
speaking, borders between film and performance are very blurred to
me. Might be it is a part of my natural inclination to break up
through everything working on the edge where no borders exit at all –
anything is possible whatever crazy or unrealistic mix it can be.
Film organically becomes a performance and performance becomes a film
– in both of those states of consciousness truth is not a matter to
be concerned with.
Consequently,
'The End of The Beginning or The Beginning of The End' as a film is
an independent artwork on its own right. In spite of being created on
the basis of the installation, it neither documents the installation
nor tells the story behind it. In effect, performance in the film is
a proper film acting as a life action simulation to emphasise the
power of technology in generating a reality that is more real than
the actual reality itself.
When
completed ['The End of The Beginning or The Beginning of The End'
installation], it became clear to me that the whole atmosphere
referred to a hospital ward, or a morgue cell, or remains after the
war and natural catastrophe altogether.
I was standing there looking
at everything and thinking some type of dark thoughts without any
particular reason. Just being influenced by what I was experiencing.
It was the end of something. And the most disastrous that this
something might not have started yet.
The time coincided with the end
of my residency period. I was exhausted but happy. Needed to come up
with a title in the morning. I teared a piece from a cardboard and
scratched something down. When home I read a cardboard and it kind of
made sense.
To check whether it was
used before I went online. Churchill immediately came out saying this
phrase concerning the Second
Battle of El Alamein. It
was just perfect.
