ヨコハマ・フィールドワーク/都市のミーム - トピック返信
2009年11月24日 06:42

去る11月22日、カリン・ヴァン・ダムさんによる東京フィールドワーク報告イベントが行われました。
ご足労いただきました方々に、この場を借りて心から御礼を申し上げます。

これは今年、遊工房にレジデンス滞在しながら東京をフラヌールしたカリンさんの、作品のための取材記録の一部です。
今回は「都市のミーム」というテーマで彼女の選んだ写真にコメントをつけてもらい、それをスライドショーの形式で編集したものと、カリンさんのインスタレーション内部を旅する映像二本を公開いたしました。
これらの映像は近日中に、ヨコハマ国際映像祭公式サイト・プログラムにあります「Karin van Dam: スライドショー」から日本語訳つきで鑑賞できるようになる予定です。(掲載されました→ http://www.ifamy.jp/programs/single/885/ )

では、以下にカリンさんのテキストを掲載しておきます。
なお、カリンさんの作品集(アートブック)は会期中、「都市のミーム」ブースに展示しておりますので、どうぞお手に取ってご覧ください。


My work

I build up my works like a drawing, intuitive and unconscious with different day-life materials and self-made elements. On one occasion in intimate, tactile, delicate works on another occasion in monumental meters-high installations.
With drawn materials or with prefabricated products; with paper, black chalk, rope, thread, balls of wool, nets and gauze- or with polyester ponds, black pits or scaffolding; these are the building blocks with which the work reveals and divulges itself to us like an organism.
All element are connected to each other and the space around with ropes threads, tensioning straps, rubber bands and paper fasteners. They form the links, they spin the web of \'the city\'.

My books gave you the impression of a walk (or flight) into my installations. Some (detail) images are connected with photo\'s where the work was inspired by. In my books I also make delicate sculptures (pop-ups) who are often inspired by maps of a city. I call these books Traveling Guide.

My films

I made after finishing the installation. An overall view is missing. I want to give the illusion to flow into a strange inhabitant environment like an endless aquarium.
(toghether with cameraman Marcel Prins)

film 1: Pieces of Land (2002)

film 2: Bumping Tumble (2009)


【Patterns and Structures (Viewpoint Tokyo)】

My work is about cities. Not so much cities as petrified architecture, but as large organisms. When I visit a city for the first time I look for structures, forms and objects that relate to everyday life. Those can be very ordinary things, which are in my opinion quite extraordinary. They are not necessarily what they at first appear to be. By using them in my work their meaning is altered and they take on a strange and poetic layering.

I have walked through Tokyo’s twenty-three districts and some of the suburbs and I have travelled on the city’s three underground and overground transport networks. Tokyo appears to be monumental but is also vulnerable and fragile. Because of the streets’ and buildings’ numerous interwoven changes of level you are no longer aware which is the actual ground level. Via streets and stairs you constantly ascend and descend to different layers. Without really being aware of it you are suddenly looking down on a cavity in which you stood only moments before.

Tokyo builds skywards and deep beneath the ground, but upon closer examination the city is actually a paper-thin filigree network. The earth tremors are unpredictable and can change everything with a single stroke. The new tall buildings stand upon enormous springs to allow them to move with the vibrations. I find this tension fascinating and thought about it often wherever I was in the city. In the Science Museum there is a monitor with a map of Japan showing the earth’s tremors in real time: the beating heart beneath the city transformed into a graphic image.

Photographs of patterns such as the car turntable you saw, the manhole covers arranged so casually alongside each other or the painted feet on the metro platforms seem to me to refer to an underlying layer that is not immediately evident.

Of a different nature are the organic groupings of objects within the city – I call them still lifes – which have evolved in an intuitive fashion. I see these as a combination of objects that appears to have no logic or has not been consciously coordinated.

I find this image of the pink and blue sinks in a window draped with plants so strange.
What does this tableau tell us? This is just one small moment, but such images recur throughout the entire city: monumental buildings next to small delicate (almost paper) houses, which are linked by enormous bundles of cables and other connecting elements.

I never use botanical elements such as trees, plants or flowers in my work, which is always concerned with constructions and accumulations of objects. Nonetheless, in Tokyo nature is inextricably embedded in the city, even if only in the sounds of the insects that dominate in certain places and which hold your attention from a great distance. Invisible creatures that together create such a great monotonous sound that they form a sort of meditative cocoon. They act as a sort of living cement between the built-up sites.

Tokyo is a fascinating city in relation to my work. I went there with an open mind and allowed the city to wash over me. Looking back at the work I have made over the last ten years, I see traces of Tokyo within it. For example, the installation I made in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht in 2002 with deep black pits suspended in the space contrasting with fine clouds of perforated maps: for me this is Tokyo. I have never before experienced a city that comes so close to my own working practice, both as an inspiration for new work and in terms of confronting me with my own aesthetic concerns.
For new work I made these photographs . They are not meant as independent art works (sometimes they do), but as rough material for inspiration. They show my view point on Tokyo.


Karin van Dam 2009 www.karinvandam.com




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