2012
土の巡礼
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2012
Soil Pilgrimage
Soil Museum Mogura no Yakata (Niigata)
soil, etc.
Production assistance: Masato Honda, Emma Komatsu, Yoshihisa Okawara
2012
土の巡礼
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2012
Soil Pilgrimage
Soil Museum Mogura no Yakata (Niigata)
soil, etc.
Production assistance: Masato Honda, Emma Komatsu, Yoshihisa Okawara
"Pilgrimage of Soil" by Yoshitaka Nanjo was presented at the Soil Museum Mogura no Yakata (Mole House) during the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2012. Nanjo repeatedly walked around the former Shimojo Elementary School and its surroundings, and painted the landscapes of each location onto the windowpanes using local soil. The soil landscapes, receiving light, cast shadows on the floor, simultaneously incorporating the actual scenery outside the window as borrowed scenery. Past works were also placed alongside it, creating a space where memories of various places circulate through the medium of soil.
At the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2012, "Soil Museum Mole House" was structured as an exhibition that re-examined the relationship between people and land from multiple perspectives, with "soil" as its central theme. Set in the former Shimojo Elementary School, it featured diverse practices by earthworkers, ceramic artists, soil scientists, photographers, and painters, who treated soil as a material, research subject, and medium for memory.
Yoshitaka Nanjo's "Pilgrimage of Soil" is a work born from a process of repeated walking and research around this abandoned school and the surrounding area. The work primarily involves using soil collected at each location to paint the landscape of that place on the windowpane. The painted soil landscapes, when exposed to natural light, cast shadows and images on the classroom floor. At the same time, it incorporates the current landscape unfolding beyond the window as borrowed scenery, functioning as a device to superimpose inside and outside, past and present.
For example, in the moment when the smoke from burning straw in the field outside the window overlaps with the landscape painted with soil, an accidental event is incorporated as part of the artwork. Here, rather than a fixed image, the situation itself, which changes with time, emerges as the landscape.
In addition to new works, this exhibition also featured works created by Nanjo using local soil from various parts of Japan. By bringing together soil from different lands in one space, viewers can experience the landscapes of each region in a traversal manner through the soil. "Pilgrimage of Soil" is positioned as an attempt to reconstruct landscapes not as fixed images, but as physical experiences through movement, collection, and depiction.