Panyu District
Guangzhou
China
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11am–5pm
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Precarious Tasks: A Letter to the Wanderer No.1
Dear friends:
How’s it going?
From this winter on, we began our conversations around Koki Tanaka’s Precarious Tasks, and we’ve been trying to understand the following questions since the very beginning: what do these Precarious Tasks that have been continually unfolding since 2012 along with the disasters experienced by the mankind mean to our daily experiences? While these Precarious Tasks are being carried out at various places like Tokyo, Yokohama, Rotterdam, London, Eindhoven, Berlin and Hong Kong, what’s the relationship between these happenings and those who are not present when they took place
We started our “gatherings” like the ones that took place in Precarious Tasks. We gathered together to read and translate the artist’s notes by Koki Tanaka, while collective translations and discussions are deepening the moments evoked in one’s own experiences and continuously overlapping and blending into the moments captured in photographs from the Precarious Tasks.
We are pondering why would Koki Tanka walk again the roads one year after his friends had walked at the night after the earthquake? Why talk about his name while gathering to share emergency food together? Why read out in a city all its citizens’ names? Why look at the view of the city together in a room that is at close altitude of a tsunami’s waves? Why walk the streets together at night while swinging a flash light? If we have to stay together for 24 hours, how will we get along? By questioning the Precarious Tasks and the fissions and coincidences in our experiences, we are imagining if we can feel empathy for the situations of the humankind like how Koki questions it?
Those emergency moments lurk in the everyday life. When Precarious Tasks flow to the Mirrored Gardens, it seems that a new horizon is emerging from the overlapping terrains of the Mirrored Gardens, which weaves together the artists’ experiences, different groups of people’s experiences, disasters and daily experiences, as well as the experiences encountered by different individuals.
This winter, from January 24, we invite you to experience, read and enter the space of the Precarious Tasks, linger around the moments that are inhabited by people, moments that are open toward uncertainties while staying warm and connected.
Winter’s Regards!
“Silent journeys group," Mirrored Gardens
January 18, 2019
Special Thanks: Chien-hung Huang dialogues with Koki Tanaka.
Project title: Precarious Tasks #1 Swinging a Flash Light while We Walk at Night
Date: September 29, 2012
Format: Collective acts, photo documentation
Location: Idogaya, Yokohama
Created with blanClass, Yokohama, and The Japan Foundation
Participants: Yoko Asai, Masaharu Futoyu, Yoko Hagihara, Rikako Hirata, Taku Hisamura, Sachie Hoshi, Rio Hosoguchi, Gohya Iijima, Hatsuko Inamura, Fumio Inoue, Tamao Iwasa, Noriko Kamiya, Hikotaro Kanehira, Haruka Kawaguchi, Haruo Kobayashi, Junichi Kojima, Ryota Kuraoka, Mika Kuraya, Masaki Matsumoto, Hiroaki Morita, Urara Nakamura, Masahide Nakamura, Mihoko Nishikawa, Takahiro Ogawa, Naomi Oguchi, Hideyo Ohtsuki, Yoshitomo Ono, Mari Saito, Yu Sakamoto, Ken Sasaki, Toshiko Sato, Isao Sato, Kariya Sayoko, Gou Shibata, Naoko Shoji, Teppei Soutome, Keishi Suzuki, Hikaru Takata, Ryosuke Tanaka, Kei Ueda, Yoko Washio, Mitsuhiro Yamagiwa, Kazutaka Yoshida, Kenichi Yoshida
Artist’s Notes:
For this task participants and I walked the streets at night, each of us carrying a flashlight. The venue, blanClass, is in the Yokohama district of Idogaya, a particularly hilly part of town. Leaving blanClass around seven in the evening, we first of all climbed the hill behind the gallery, and looked down over the nighttime city from a slope in a pitch-dark park. Next we sprawled out spontaneously on a vacant lot, made our way through a long, narrow tunnel, found an old disused drinking fountain, and carried on through the nighttime residential neighborhood to the river. After walking for about an hour, we returned to blanClass, and had a drink while discussing our actions.
(2012, Translated by Pamela Miki & Associates)
People temporarily assemble under special circumstances and attempt to respond to their situation together. What kind of situation would you visualize when you hear this? You might connect it to everyday experiences, like forming a completely new team of co-workers in response to a commission for a new project, or asking an outside expert to help resolve a problem that has developed in your community. Maybe you think of this special situation as an art project. Or maybe you imagine the social conditions generated by a disaster.
Precarious Tasks was conceived as a series in which assembled participants would experience a situation determined by hypothetical ideas and a loose framework decided by me. For example, bringing neglected teabags that were lying around the kitchen to a temporary gathering, and drinking the resulting blend of teas together; walking together through the streets at night; telling someone about your name; retracing the path a friend took when she had to walk home after the earthquake; sleeping as a group, and then sharing your dreams; viewing the landscape together from a room that is the same height as that reached by the waves of the tsunami; making a signal for declaring your intent to participate in the anti-nuclear demonstrations, no matter where you are, and even if you are not there in person; reading out all the names of the inhabitants of a city; going to a bar that is twenty kilometers away in order to get an idea of the 20-kilometer exclusion zone, and then thinking about the nuclear problem; staying together for a 24-hour period.
The challenge here is to create an extemporaneous chain reaction for questioning how we can rethink what is happening in Japan right now, or, rather, it is a kind of preparation for doing so. There is no predetermined endpoint for where this preparation will lead. First assemble, then dialogue and act.
(August 2014, Translated by Andrew Maerkle)
About Mirrored Gardens
Inspired by the natural and traditional characteristics of the surrounding villages, the project space of Mirrored Gardens seeks to merge with its environment to construct a “nature,” where contemporary art practices, daily life and farming-oriented life practices can be nurtured and cultivated in tandem. The architecture of Mirrored Gardens is designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects.
