outside of time

Panari-yaki style vases, rock salt, hemp fibers... The objects in this piece all have strong connections to ancient memories. Terracotta pots whose recipes have long since been lost, passed down only in the ancient songs taught to children by their parents. This pot was once used both to store food, and to bury the dead. From the dark hollow containing the cycle of life and death, a white string stretches out. Steam hits the transparent rock salt and it gradually begins to melt; it falls back into the water as a droplet containing 400,000,000 years of condensed history. The hemp connecting the charcoal has been used for holy spaces since antiquity, and these scenes are captured by a giant lens that sometimes twists them, and sometimes hits them with light concentrated by the curve. Everything is managed by a controlled machine, and the items gradually change their shape in rhythm. Here, organic uncertainties like the weather, temperature, knot in the rope, and height of the rope, exist alongside inorganic precision and rules. Beyond the infinite network of memories held by these objects are yet more memories. These may be things we overlook in our everyday lives, or awkward things cut off by the speed of modern society. The vague, seemingly contrasting relationship between nature and machine might awaken the records in our own memories.

Photo : Masaki Ogawa
Movie : Shuhei Miyagawa
Engineer : Yusuke Saitoh