The Fictional Island

 

 

 

>watch on youtube

Video Insatallation/2016/20min
Material - Slag, Projector, Speaker

Jul. 2016 "SETOUCHI Art Triennale" at Seaside Inujima Gallery, Okayama, Japan
organized by FKUTAKE Foundation
Aug. 2017 "BankART Life 5" at BankART Studio NYK, Yokohama, Japan
Nov. 2017 "Jakarta Biennale" Jakarta, Indonesia
Nov. 2018 "Re:_____" at F1963, Busan, Korea
Feb.2019 solo exhibiton "Image and Body" @BankART SILK, Yokohama, Japan
Sep.2019 "Shanghai Urban Space Art Season 2019" Shanghai, China
Jan.2020 "Fictional Island" at Funabashi Andersen Park

 

Recalling the gradual border between the topography and landscape that separates the sea and the island, and the temporal border that connects the past and the future,the images in the video installation are projected on an imaginary island made of sand. Through changes in time and scale, we are urged to perceive a new future just up ahead.

 

 

I made this work on a small island named "Inujima" in the Seto Inland Sea. In the early 1900s, "Inujima" flourished with copper smelting. At its peak, there were about 5,000 inhabitants on the island. It is the times when Japan was making great progress by modern industries. This work is projected on black sand called “Slag". "Slag" is an unnecessary substance contained in rock, it was removed in the process of copper refining, and was discarded as industrial waste. This black sand just symbolizes the positive and negative parts of the times. There are only a little over 40 residents in Inujima now (2016).

I have explored the past and future of Inujima, and the shape of a new world, through this work. There is a landscape lost on this island and at the same time, there are as many stories as that number. Long ago, people gathered on this island and started living. The island prospered at one time and declined at a time, and draws the current landscape while repeating it. I find a new landscape on the relics of some era that was excavated, and the story of this small island, not in the city.

This island supported the lives of ordinary people at that time and supported a certain the times of this country. I wanted to draw the first light at the time left behind and draw a new line. The facts of an instant are not caught by the eye and cannot be properly portrayed by something like words. A landscape is lost by words and, as might be expected, by silence, too. The world changes in too short of a time, and thought can no longer keep abreast of its pace. We shall wait here for the emergence of facts beyond our imagination, from things, from lines, from time, and from body.

 

 

©2017 Keisuke Takahashi.