Most of the desires fulfilled by urban life, such as eating, shopping, or watching movies, are activities that take place indoors. However, even so, on early Sunday mornings, you can find young people who enjoyed the night sleeping comfortably on the streets in front of train stations. During weekday mornings or in smoking areas, people gather to smoke before work or during breaks. You can also see young people and tourists storing their luggage in street lockers at the entrance to downtown areas or parks, eager to enjoy clubs, sightseeing, or shopping. If you move to an office district, you can witness an eerie sight of crows and kite birds flying around, targeting discarded raw meat from nearby meat markets. In Tokyo, it’s not uncommon for functions and desires that should be confined within buildings to spill over into the outdoors.
Exhibition Statement
Keiko Kitagawa is focusing her aesthetic research on such “desires” in the city of Tokyo, and she is proposing a new point of view concerning the relationship between architecture and the city.
The current Tokyo has a basic structure that has been updated and inherited from infrastructures like waterways, roads, and railways built during Edo period, as well as temple and shrine systems and park cemeteries. If you take an overview of the composition, where infrastructure connects and supports the core functions of administration, business, and commerce, the central area appears to be like an open organism. Government districts, financial, commercial areas, and office districts can be compared to central parts of the brain or important organs like the heart. Urban infrastructures like waterways, roads, and railways resemble blood vessels and lymphatic vessels circulating cells within the body. On a smaller scale, people cleaning the outer walls of buildings function like cells with the body’s self-cleaning function, and the early morning bell can be compared to the regular beating of the heart.
Another characteristic of Tokyo is the abundance of temples and shrines. Temples and parks, quietly guarding places near redevelopment sites where tall buildings are beingconstructed, act like cooling devices that bring heated economic activity back to a normal state. From cemeteries adjacent to temples, you can see buildings shaped almost the same as gravestones beyond the fences. In the back alleys of downtown buildings, you might encounter a strange scene where a dimly lit communal cemetery spreads with sunlight reflecting off a shining office building in the background. In this way, Tokyo can be said to be a place where life and death coexist through structures.
Kitagawa has been documenting such urban elements that represent desires and phenomena interacting with the city as a living organism through photographs.
Eventually, just like humans, cities that continue to change actively will also end their activities. What will happen to the urban elements that represented desires and the relationship between architecture and the city at that time? The artist’s challenge for this exhibition is to imagine Tokyo 400 years from now when resources have somehow been exhausted, and most of the ground has turned to rubble. The buildings we currently live in and use will lose their indoor spaces, and the current outdoor urban spaces will become the interior of ghostly architectures, with graves bustling as residences. In smoking areas, ghostly salarymen who still love smoking will be puffing smoke, and children ghosts will be running up outdoor emergency stairs that had been abandoned.
Alongside Kitagawa, another Tokyo, expressed through model works by Toshiharu Maeda (M.D. Binji), becomes an architectural space for ghosts where the current relationship between architecture and the city is twisted.
At the exhibition at Jinny Street Gallery, Kitagawa, with the cooperation of Maeda, has compiled the overall scenario, and Maeda has created model works based on the scenario and photos. Additionally, young artists Tatsunosuke Shibata and Suzuka Okuda have cooperated in creating pedestals, concepts, and models.
Jinny Street Gallery