日下部民藝館 55周年記念特別展 落合陽一 『遍在する身体　交錯する時空間』

Perhaps it’s because people have become accustomed to a post-corona life, they live with habits that seem to be unchanged for the foreseeable future, even once the coronavirus pandemic has passed. The digital body, transformed through lenses and sensors, is instantaneously connected to anywhere in the world and travels the globe each and every day. Ochiai has become more aware than ever of the body that exists through the medium of images. In other words, the images and the process of imaging themselves have disappeared from people’s consciousness. The whole world has undergone an irreversible change and is stepping into a state in which time and space, body and
emotion, cannot exist without digital transformations. In 1980, Nam June Paik called these changes “stationar y nomads.” He mentioned a digital approach to oil depletion, although, oddly enough, pandemics and decarbonization have transformed our existence into that of stationary nomads in a different way than Nam June Paik imagined. In the days of stationary nomadism, Ochiai found that the altered physicality aroused an interest in the everyday lifestyle.

As an artist, Ochiai creates both digital and physical artworks, and they have the motif of materialization, transformation, and the aspiration of giving mass to digital ideas in the realm divided by massless data and physical materials. This is an exploration of the artist’s personal lifestyle and the creation of installations that harmonize the landscape by bringing together the original material world and the world of massless data achieved through digital technology. Within this context, Ochiai has long been interested in mingei (folk crafts) prior to the coronavirus pandemic. For him, if digital nature has accomplished the marriage of massless data and physical materials, it was a question of whether or not mingei could be established based on a new nature. And his returning expectations grow for mingei to play a vital role in various fields, such as the solution of the carbon cycle with digital and division, life and standard, and more.

If people were stationary agriculturalists or industrialists after the end of agriculturalization and industrialization, the question of what kind of mingei the stationary nomad-like life would produce drives Ochiai’s creativity. When thinking of the stationary nomad, many would ponder if it is a change with such a strong influence that alters the social image of hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies, and industrial societies. If so, there is a need to rethink it in terms of longer lifestyles and consider the transition of civilizations, rather than simply in terms of media relations, technological development, and resolution. In consideration of carbon
neutrality, Ochiai wondered how the people of Hida Takayama, who have lived surrounded by forests, have cultivated their culture and maintained their ecosystem, and what mingei and traditions have arisen from this.

Upon visiting a paper-making studio in Hida and holding a workshop to print on the Japanese washi paper, a transformed form of wood, and experiencing the culture of each community, Ochiai wondered how to reclaim the experience of celebration and co-existence between the dispersed and depopulated stationary nomadism by decarbonization and the digital, and found an answer between contingency and handicrafts, and the plasticity and one-time nature of the digital. In addition, as he looked at the many stone sticks and earthenware vessels left behind by the Jomon-era Hida people, who coincidentally became ubiquitous stationary hunter-gatherers, he began to think more deeply about the relationship between physicality and tools. In his search for the culture of wood carving, he has seen the extremes of Jomon physicality and felt the aspiration for physicality in the arm-long and foot-long figures carved on the Ebisu festival float by Yoroku Taniguchi during the Edo era. Ochiai began to search for an opportunity to grasp the key to post-digital nomadism and its aesthetics by deciphering the culture and spirituality of wood, the Jomon, and the pre-agricultural era.

The Tenaga (Long Arms) and Ashinaga (Long Legs) are people who live and work together by catching fish, as described in Chinese my tholog y. Their appearance has been introduced to Japan, where they have been transformed into various forms, such as giant monsters and octopus-catching monsters, and have been preserved in Japanese folklore. In Japanese mythology, the parents of the Inadahime deity, who is offered to the eight-forked serpent god, Yamata- no-Orochi, are Tenazuchi (arm deity) and Ashinazuchi (leg deity). The existence of the Tenaga Shrine (long-arm shrine) and Ashinaga Shrine (long-leg shrine) in Nagano may express the connection between hunting and gathering, and wood culture in Japan. The ecology and culture of the sacred pillars, stone sticks, Itto-bori carvings of Hida Takayama made with a single knife, and the Jomon pottery must have been continuously passed down from generation to generation.

In reconsidering the current age of stationary nomadism, Ochiai thought about how to express this physicality and adaptation to lifestyle. Stationary nomadism has been brought about by digitalization and dematerialization or embodiment. It is a transformation of time and space into an interweaving of ubiquitous bodies. As people have become more and more aware of their physicality, their bodies have been transformed into disparate forms that are ubiquitous throughout the world. Time rewinds and repeats, the future and the past exist in parallel , the body is replicated, and the pas- sage of time approaches insignificance.

What kind of dialogue do the emotional and narrative forms of the digital nature in the current age have with mingei, and what kind of physicality do they evoke in the new life? Ochiai seeks to depict the changing landscape with the theme of time, space, and omnipresent physicality intersected by the digital.