Photography: Keizo Kioku
2017
シアターシュメール
Oku-Noto Triennale 2017 / Theater Sumer
Former Iida Smell Hall (Ishikawa)
Diatomaceous earth, cinema equipment, lighting fixtures, folk art, sound equipment, etc.
Special lighting: Yasuhito Suzuki
Cooperation: Noto Combustion Equipment Industry, Former Iida Smell Museum
2017
シアターシュメール
Oku-Noto Triennale 2017 / Theater Sumer
Former Iida Smell Hall (Ishikawa)
Diatomaceous earth, cinema equipment, lighting fixtures, folk art, sound equipment, etc.
Special lighting: Yasuhito Suzuki
Cooperation: Noto Combustion Equipment Industry, Former Iida Smell Museum
Photography: Keizo Kioku
"Oku-Noto Triennale 2017"
In a space that once served as a movie theater and embraced the town's vibrancy, soil quietly falls and accumulates.
"Theater Sumer" is an attempt to listen to the invisible layers that have accumulated of people's memories and the town's history. Illuminated by the lights, the tools and signs that are gradually buried do not confine the past, but rather interact with the present moment, transforming into a new landscape. In the stillness reminiscent of the ocean floor, viewers will also touch upon the depths of their own memories.
"Oku-Noto Triennale2017 "
"Theater Sumer" is an installation that uses a former movie theater in Iida-machi, Suzu City, as its stage to allow viewers to experience the accumulation of time spatially and physically. This building, which served as a place of entertainment and interaction for the community from the 1950s to the 1980s, has ended its role with the decline in population and now stands in the town as a quiet void. Using diatomaceous earth, which is seabed sediment from about 12 million years ago, Nanjo has brought to life a "stratum of time" where the past and present progress simultaneously.
The soil falling from the ceiling accumulates on concrete objects such as film equipment, lighting, and shop fixtures, leaving only traces of the former hustle and bustle without directly recreating it. The flickering and blinking of lights evoke the presence of people and fragments of memories, but these are always uncertain and will eventually be covered by the soil. This process presents a perspective that re-examines history not as a fixed past, but as something that is constantly being renewed as it passes through the present.
The title, "Sumer," derives from the oldest known urban civilization, which remained buried underground for a long period. Drawing a parallel to this civilization, which has begun to speak again through excavation, this work entrusts the cycle of forgetting and rebirth to the viewer's own bodily sensations. Here, time is not explained, but rises up as a phenomenon that quietly "happens" within space, leading us to the boundary between reality and unreality.